The Blog of Ian Pace, pianist, musicologist, political animal. A place for thoughts, reflections, links, both trivial and not so trivial. Main website is at http://www.ianpace.com . Contact e-mail ian@ianpace.com.

I’M ONE of a class of 15 eight-year-olds, shivering as I stand by the edge of a state-of- the-art swimming pool. The master walks along the line, pulling open the front of each of our standard-issue red trunks so that he can stare inside and inspect our name tag’.

This happens every week, to every class. Why it’s so important that each pair of trunks be so rigorously identified with its owner is something we are never told.

And it isn’t just the eccentric action of one strange man but an institutional practice. The school has specifically insisted that each boy’s name be sewn into the front of his trunks.

I recall my mother proudly doing as instructed while we considered the strangeness of this protocol – one of those mysterious rites of public school culture that one didn’t question if one wanted the privilege of sending one’s son to a place of grand tradition. Could the reason, which seemed so obscure then, really be so blindingly, pathetically obvious now?

Our teacher, one year, is a charismatic man. He is also a sadist of whom we are in perpetual terror. I return to his classroom from a music lesson one day to discover him in a frenzy of rage, provoked by some unspecified act of insolence from a boy in our class – our hero, the best at sports and the best-looking. Our teacher drags him bodily across the desk, ripping the buttons from his shirt, beating him – with a fierce backhand – so badly across the face that he draws blood.

Then he places our sobbing classmate across his lap and, in a bizarre display of sympathy, begins to stroke his head and back while offering a detached third-person narrative – This is where the boy weeps, this is where the master feels regret’ – which, looking back on it, I can only describe as pornographic, post-coital even.

These are a few examples of what is now being called historical’ abuse: not in Dickensian England, as the phrase might suggest, but the 1970s. Although my experiences were unpleasant, it turns out that I got off lightly. I was one of the luckier ones.

Colet Court and its parent school, St Paul’s – which is often described as one of the top three independent schools in the country – together alma maters of Chancellor George Osborne, Attorney General Dominic Grieve, the billionaire Lloyd Dorfman (the founder of Travelex) et al, find themselves at the centre of a storm of media scrutiny.

The schools are now, as a result, the subject of a massive police investigation into practices of sexual abuse and concealment dating from as far back as 50 years. Many of the incidents and practices I have already described will be familiar to anyone who has attended or read about public schools over the past five decades.

What is different in the case of St Paul’s is the scale. There are currently 18 masters being investigated, alive and dead, and 180 victims, witnesses, and potential witnesses have come forward. And the numbers are growing. So far, the media have focused on a handful of names: Anthony Fuggle, classics master at Colet Court, who left the school in September of last year after being arrested and released on bail for possession of indecent material discovered on a school computer.

Keith Perry, history master at St Paul’s for 38 years, was convicted earlier this year for possession of indecent material involving the most serious level of child pornography. Paul Topham (deceased) was investigated but never convicted of sexual abuse.

Alan Doggett, music and boarding-house master at Colet Court until 1968, was a member of the Paedophile Information Exchange who killed himself ten years after leaving the school when he was being charged with child abuse. Patrick Marshall, geography and rowing master, is currently on bail after allegations of abuse, which he denies.

I clearly recall another occasion during my schooldays involving the same charismatic master who assaulted our class hero. He issues instructions over the school’s public address system that we are to assemble in the hall during lunch break – an unusual occurrence which presages high drama.

We are not disappointed. Hands literally shaking, he announces that excrement has been smeared over one of the upstairs lavatories, and that he has made his class get down on their hands and knees to clean it up, describing them as s***-house wallahs’. A number of them are sick. The combination of appalled indignation, disgust and excitement is, again, highly memorable – but perhaps hard to picture if you’ve never met such a man.

One Monday morning I arrive at school to hushed talk among the other 11-year-olds. A boy I know has been forced into oral sex by a boarding-house monitor several years his senior. He is not the only one. And where was the boarding-house master, known to preside over his empire with a slipper, while this was going on?

We are expected to express no weakness, vulnerability or sympathy. The cruelty which our masters show to us we then visit upon one another singly or in groups, and soon we are doing their job for them. Bullying is commonplace and takes many forms, not just physical. The lingua franca of the school is a kind of sneering insolence, in imitation of our elders and seemingly with their approval.

We learn to hate and humiliate one another. The most sympathetically advanced among us come to hate themselves, too. Friendships are more like strategic alliances. Violence and humiliation are perpetual and endemic: random fights, organised fights, boys dragged from changing rooms by their peers and thrown naked into the corridor, to howls of laughter.

A conker fight for us doesn’t just mean the time-honoured schoolboy ritual but the use of conkers as missiles. After-school film shows on Friday nights are followed by riots that would seem more fitting at Belmarsh or in an H Block.

Like prison, the atmosphere is highly charged with sex, though not in any way you would associate with affection. We attack each other’s genitals as a matter of sport. But even though we are sometimes caught in these acts by our teachers, no comment or intervention is made.

Inattentiveness, late homework or mischief in class or at games, however, are another matter. On the sports field, discipline is maintained with the unorthodox use of a cricket bat, preferably on naked buttocks in the changing rooms. In the classroom, the preferred media are chalk and those old-fashioned wooden blackboard rubbers, which hurtle through the air towards our unsuspecting heads.

One especially good shot with a piece of chalk from a maths teacher prompts cheers from our class, excepting only the poor object of his target practice, from whom it elicits tears of pain and humiliation. But no fear, our own turn will come soon.

Mine comes at the hands of Mr White (RIP), an Army veteran with a perpetual grin that you mistake for good nature at your peril. For daring to communicate with the boy next to me in class he takes our heads and bangs them together six times (I can still count them) – with such force that I go home and vomit, and am unable to walk all weekend.

When my mother asks why, I say I have a bug. The shame of what’s been done to me is so great I find myself unable to say it. My inability to tell what has happened does even more damage than the act of physical violence.

We graduate to the senior school and life becomes moderately less savage. The violence recedes, but the cold atmosphere of unrestrained power and contempt remains. Where dog eats dog, the favoured attention of our masters provides some kind of solace and protection. My own protector is a seedy teacher who likes to tell me of his lust for young girls.

Then one day a boy climbs out of a third-floor window during class and drops 40ft to the atrium below, miraculously surviving, after which he is quietly removed from the school.

An announcement is made over the public address system that we are not to discuss what has happened, neither among ourselves nor at home, and certainly not with the Press, on pain of expulsion.

No efforts are made to engage with or understand what has happened and why. No counselling or explanation is offered. Omerta.

In response to the current crisis, the school has issued a series of letters over the past few weeks to try to reassure current pupils, parents and governors that these crimes are historical in nature and the school is complying with police procedure.

They mostly say that the school is an institution with nothing to hide or be ashamed of, modern in its standards of child welfare and transparency. Anyone tarnished by the emerging scandal, whether as an abuser or a concealer, is said to belong to history’.

This confident separation of past and present, though comforting perhaps to the school and current pupils and parents, needs closer scrutiny.

In a letter to parents dated May 1 of this year, Tim Meunier, headmaster of Colet Court, advises boys not to gossip or chatter, either face-to-face or online, about matters that have been reported in the newspapers’.

In a memo sent to all tutors on March 25 (the date of the first articles about the scandal) and forwarded privately by a concerned parent, High Master Mark Bailey advises tutors to tell their boys: Do not indulge in careless talk on social networks […] It is neither appropriate nor sensible and saying anything defamatory could land you in serious trouble.’

The dangers of chatting online one can understand. But face-to-face? What does that say about current attitudes there and how much they claim to have changed? Surely an institution like this should be less confident of its position, more questioning, open, humble, curious, self-doubting and analytical?

In response to questioning, St Paul’s said the boys have been told to talk about it if they wish, to speak to independent counsellors who have been provided, and to contact police or social services in the event of any concerns.

The letters remind me of another incident that happened to me at Colet Court when I was eight. My father had, unbeknown to me, written the headmaster a letter. I had been in a fight with a boy who insulted me racially and my father, an East End Jew and Blitz survivor who was bursting with pride that he had come far enough in life to send his son to this prestigious place, wrote to the then headmaster Henry Collis (now deceased), in indignation.

Collis invited me to recount my side of the story, but when I began to say the boy’s name, he shut me up with a threatening wave of the finger and the admonition that gentlemen don’t tell tales’.

I was being told, in no uncertain terms, that I and my father didn’t understand the first rule of gentlemanly behaviour, which was not to talk out of school.

I decided, out of pride for myself and my father, that I would henceforth make every effort to defy this man’s definition of a gentleman. I am delighted to be able to do so again here, on behalf of myself and of my late father.

The point of this is not to whinge about my treatment, but to question a mind set which, in my day, opened the gates to other kinds of immorality. The school has a history of not listening. Will it finally change?

lYou can contact detectives investigating masters from the school on 020 7161 0500, or email opwinthorpe@met.pnn.police.uk

Teachers at 130 independent schools have been implicated in sex crimes against hundreds of children, an analysis by The Times reveals today. Experts warn of a looming scandal over the abuse of boys in boarding schools during the past half century.

The list features dozens of Britain’s leading public schools well as 20 elite prep schools that regularly send children to Eton College. Included are 64 mainstream private-sector establishments, most of them boarding schools, where at least one male teacher has been convicted of sexually abusing boys, and a further 30 at which a member of staff was sentenced for possessing child abuse mages.

Analysis of past crimes, scandals and police investigations at 130 schools reveals a significant surge in criminal prosecutions since 2012, often for offences that happened many years ago. Should the pattern continue, it is likely to damage schools’ reputations and finances. With annual boarding fees averaging £27,000, many are increasingly reliant on income from the 25,400 foreign pupils who occupy more than a third of boarding school beds.

Across the UK, about 6.5 per cent of schoolchildren are educated in the independent sector. Fifty of the 253 independent schools that make up the Headmasters and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC), Britain’s private-sector elite, have been connected with child abuse.

One specialist linked the significant growth in complaints to an increasing national awareness of the lasting damage caused by such crimes. Britain’s middle classes had belatedly decided that it is “socially respectable” to discuss childhood abuse, it was claimed while the head of a victims’ campaign group suggested that traditional male “stiff upper lip” attempts to shrug aside sexual trauma were increasingly viewed as outdated.

In the past 20 years, one or more men who taught at 62 independent schools, including Haberdashers’ Aske’s, Ampleforth, Wellington College, King Edward’s School Birmingham and The Oratory School, Reading, have been convicted of sex crimes – from indecent assault to gross indecency and buggery – against 277 male pupils.

Prosecutions involving 18 of those 62 schools came to court in the past two years. Former teachers from a further four independent schools have been charged and are awaiting trial.

Eton, Marlborough, Millfield, Oundle and Tonbridge are among 30 other schools where a male teacher has been convicted of possessing child abuse images. Downside School, Somerset, features in both categories.

Another 36 private-sector schools have been linked to child abuse. They include as yet unresolved prosecutions, civil actions for damages following an alleged abuser’s death, teachers convicted of abusing boys unconnected to their school, and police investigations that led to arrests but no charges.

In this category are Harrow, Sedbergh and Durham schools, all raided in the late 1990s during a nationwide investigation into an alleged paedophile network of teachers at six leading public schools. A teacher at each school was questioned and material including photographs, videos, letters and computer equipment was seized. No one was prosecuted due to lack of evidence.

In several cases that led to convictions, it later emerged that independent schools sought to protect their reputation by covering up potential scandals, allowing teachers to move to other schools where their crimes continued.

In a few cases, schools where teachers abused boys cannot be named, even years later, because court orders prohibit their identification. They include two leading London public schools.

Keir Starmer, QC, until last year the Director of Public Prosecutions, said that the list would strengthen the case for a mandatory requirement that schools to report all suspected abuse. The move is being resisted by the Government.

Mr Starmer said: “During the past 18 months we spread the message that those who report such crimes will be listened to by police and prosecutors. I sense that people today feel they will be taken more seriously.”

Peter Saunders, chief executive of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood (NAPAC), said the organisation has received “many dozens” of calls from former public schoolboys “who have finally acknowledged what happened to them and want to do something about it”.

“There’s a particular vulnerability in boys’ boarding schools. Boys find it more difficult than girls to talk about their feelings. They’re brainwashed into believing that boys don’t cry. A barrier goes up but finally, in some cases 10 or 20 years after they left school, it seems to be coming down.”

Richard Scorer, a partner at Pannone Solicitors, which specialises in child abuse cases and currently represents former pupils of “at least 20″ independent schools, said the Jimmy Savile scandal “has made talking about childhood abuse more socially respectable. That’s particularly true for the middle classes.”

The Independent Schools Council (ISC), whose 1,223 schools, including HMC schools, educate 80 per cent of Britain’s private-sector pupils, said the “abuse of trust by a small number of predatory individuals” in its schools was “a matter of the very deepest regret”. A spokesman said: “While these cases are largely historic, this does not in any way lessen the anguish felt by the innocent victims.”

Parents tell of tragedies after private school child abuse; Scandal may be ‘Just tip of the iceberg’ (21.1.14) (also printed as Teacher’s letter that told abuse victim he had ‘worn out’ video of the attack)

The Times, 21st January 2014

By Andrew Norfolk and Rosemary Bennett

The teachers at 130 independent schools named by The Times as having links to child abuse represent merely “the tip of a very large iceberg”, it was claimed last night.

Dozens of readers contacted the newspaper yesterday to speak from personal experience of sex crimes committed against boys in boarding schools as long ago as the 1950s.

Their accounts, some harrowing, included details of abuse said to have taken place in 23 schools, including 17 that did not feature in yesterday’s list. Some expressed astonishment that no teacher at their former school had yet been convicted. In two separate cases, the parents of boys who each committed suicide in their 20s said that their sons had been damaged beyond repair by events that took place at a Home Counties prep school and a leading English public school.

One of those children was abused during the 1980s by his prep school cricket coach, who was later jailed for sex offences against children at another school. His crimes included making indecent videos of his victims.

The boy’s mother said that her son had never felt able to discuss what happened to him when he was at school. After his death, she found three private letters written to the child by his abuser, one of which made reference to “that video”, which the coach described as having worn out through being watched so many times.

“During the period when he was being abused, my son’s behaviour changed dramatically from that of a happy, outgoing child to that of a depressed, fearful individual,” his mother wrote. “Thank goodness our attitude is changing and more is understood about how devastating this sort of abuse can be. Maybe if we knew then what we know now, my son would still be alive.”

The list published by The Times this week identified 64 mainstream British private sector schools at which teachers have been convicted of sexual offences against boys, with prosecutions involving 18 of the schools being brought to court in the past two years.

At an additional 30 schools, including Eton, Marlborough, Millfield, Oundle and Tonbridge, teachers were found guilty of possessing child-abuse images. A further 36 schools had links to child abuse, including those where teachers are awaiting trial or have been convicted of crimes against boys who were not pupils at the school.

One school unintentionally omitted from the list was St Martin’s prep school in Northwood, London, a former teacher of which was jailed for five years in 2010. Michael Cole, who taught at the boys’ school from 1988 to 1991, was convicted of five charges of indecent assault on pupils during “health checks” when children were ordered to strip then abused. He separately admitted possessing indecent images of children.

One Times reader, a pupil at a public school in southwest England during the late 1950s and early 1960s, provided a detailed account of serial abuse committed against boys by their housemaster and the school’s chaplain. He said that the schools named yesterday, which did not include his former school, were merely “the tip of a huge iceberg, some of which will remain hidden forever”.

The man said that as a child he complained of the sexual abuse to his father and was told not to be “silly”.

In several cases that resulted in prosecutions many years later, scandals were covered up to protect a school’s reputation. Teachers were quietly required to resign and went on to abuse boys at other schools. Such examples, say child-protection campaigners, strengthen the case for the introduction of a mandatory reporting requirement that would force schools to report any suspected case of child abuse.

The scandal of child abuse at elite schools; Letters to the Editor (22.1.14)

The Times, 22nd January 2014

Sir, This disclosure of abuse in schools is welcome, for boarding schools are very “closed worlds” and children as young as 7 are still being sent into the care of strangers solely because it is “the done thing”. Abusers can find it easy to groom children who are very lonely and vulnerable as they move into the strange life of an institution.

Paedophiles often blame the children. Of course they can be condemned whatever their age, as all abusers have always known the damage they cause. This is why they work in a dark world of secrecy, lies or threats to silence their victims.

Andrew Norfolk (report, Jan 20) is absolutely right in saying that no one can be confident that abuse does not exist today. Two things would help reduce the risk.

Firstly, schools need to be truly open and honest about the nature of abuse instead of repeating that it is a thing of the past and all boarding is now safe. It is not, and some in authority collude in the abuse as they silently let known paedophile teachers move to other schools without telling the police.

Secondly, the government has to take this issue seriously. There is no such thing as “mild paedophilia”. Urgent action is needed to change the law, making it mandatory to report all abuse.
Margaret Laughton, Boarding Concern

Sir, Your report on child abuse raises important issues, and no one involved in education would wish to ignore, still less condone past incidents. However, it does seem spiteful to put on an interactive map schools where teachers were acquitted, or where no case was found to answer. A zealous attitude of “no smoke without fire” risks undermining trust in such reports. Not all those accused of a crime are guilty.
Chris Ramsey, Headmaster, The King’s School Chester

Sir, You imply that schools are to blame if the abuse does not lead to prosecution for many years. I’ve twice taught in schools where such a case occurred. In both the school acted promptly when the abuse came to light. In neither was there enough evidence for prosecution though both tried to have the perpetrator included on the sex offenders list. One attempt failed for want of evidence, though the headmaster took the risk, when later he learnt that the man was applying to another school, of warning its head. Schools are natural targets for paedophiles, boarding schools offer more opportunities and victims often can’t speak about the abuse for years. For most of your 130 you list only one offender. In how many of those cases do the victims blame the school?
Tom Mcintyre, Frome, Somerset

Sir, All criminal acts within schools are deplorable. Modern communications do indeed render children less vulnerable to such abuse (letter, Jan 21). Far more significantly, however, extensive legal, regulatory and educational safeguards are now required, including rigorous inspection.

The events of the past cannot, alas, be undone, but the concerns and actions of the present will continue to ensure ever safer and more rewarding educational experiences in the UK schools of the future.
Dr Tim Hands, Chairman, Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference

Teachers ‘abused boys at Osborne’s old school’ (25.03.14)

The Times, 25th March 2014

by Andrew Norfolk

At least six teachers at one of Britain’s most famous and successful public schools are suspected of sexually abusing boys as young as 10 over two decades.

The schoolmasters, all of whom taught at St Paul’s School or its junior division, Colet Court, are implicated in numerous alleged sexual assaults against pupils between the 1960s and the 1980s, an investigation by The Times has established.

One, a close friend of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, became a member of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), the pro-paedophilia pressure group that has been linked to senior Labour Party figures.

Alan Doggett, director of music at Colet Court, was allowed to resign after suspected serial abuse of a young pupil was exposed. He went on to teach at another leading institution, the City of London School, and became director of an acclaimed boys’ choir. He later committed suicide after being charged with indecently assaulting another boy.

An ex-pupil yesterday accused St Paul’s of exposing hundreds of boys to the risk of abuse by “hushing up” the offending that led to the teacher’s departure.

Dominic Grieve, QC, the Attorney General, was a Colet Court pupil when Doggett was asked to leave.

George Osborne, the Chancellor, also attended the prep school, which shares a 45-acre campus with St Paul’s in Barnes, southwest London. He attended the senior school in the 1980s. There is no suggestion that either was abused as a schoolboy.

On at least two more occasions in the 1960s and 1970s, St Paul’s is understood to have failed to contact police when concerns about masters’ inappropriate sexual conduct towards boys were raised by parents or members of staff. Former teachers at St Paul’s have been the subject of at least four child abuse investigations since the late 1970s. None was initiated by the school.

The most recent criminal case began last month into sexual offences allegedly committed by Patrick Marshall, 65, who taught geography and coached rowing at St Paul’s. He was arrested four weeks ago over the suspected abuse of a boy, aged 15, in the late 1970s. Police hope to speak to more ex-pupils as the inquiry continues.

Mr Marshall, who denies wrongdoing, has been released on bail. Police have previously investigated an unnamed St Paul’s teacher alleged to have abused a pupil in the 1980s. The suspect was arrested in 2000 and a file sent to the Crown Prosecution Service, which ruled there was insufficient evidence to bring charges.

Another inquiry was held in 2000 into a Colet Court teacher, Paul Topham, said to have committed offences against a boy in the late 1960s. He also was not prosecuted, and died in 2012 aged 80.

A former housemaster at the prep school, known as “Alex” Alexander, is today accused by a former pupil of serial indecent assaults during the same decade.

A sixth, unidentified teacher agreed to leave St Paul’s after a school cleaner found sado-masochistic pornography in his room, alongside a personal register of pupils subjected to private spanking sessions. Parents were told that he left for “family reasons”.

A seventh teacher, 70-year-old Keith Perry, St Paul’s “inspirational” former head of history, received a two-year suspended prison sentence last month after collecting hundreds of extreme images of naked boys.

The school at which he taught for 38 years was not named at Southwark Crown Court, where he admitted 17 offences of making and distributing child abuse images “over a substantial period of time”. In internet chat rooms, he wrote of being “obsessed” with boys as young as 8. It is not suggested that any of Perry’s crimes involved pupils at St Paul’s.

In a statement, St Paul’s stressed that none of the alleged abuse concerned staff or pupils currently at the school. It added that three of the alleged offenders were dead but called for living suspects to be “investigated and subjected to the proper processes of justice”.

“Any sexual abuse of children by an adult, and particularly by a teacher, is abhorrent, a serious violation of trust and an affront to the value of any caring community. The school deals quickly, sensitively and resolutely with any concerns or allegations of abuse. This commitment applies equally to allegations of historic abuse. Pupil welfare and safeguarding are our highest priority.”

Professor Mark Bailey, the school’s High Master, said he was “grateful to The Times for bringing these allegations to our attention”. He promised that St paul’s would co-operate fully with any investigation.

‘The teacher sat us on his lap until his face went very red’ (25.03.14)

The Times, 25th March 2014

by Andrew Norfolk

Alan Doggett, Colet Court’s director of music, was forced to resign from the school. There is no suggestion that any of the boys in the picture were abused

By the age of 12, Luke Redmond had been sexually assaulted by three men. All were teachers at a prestigious school paid handsomely by his parents to give their son the best possible start in life.

One was a “gifted colleague” of the West End giants Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber; another became an Anglican clergyman. The third sat boys on his lap until he went “very red in the face”. Such were the hazards of 1960s life in an English preparatory school.

Last year The Times revealed that five teachers at another prep school, Caldicott, in Buckinghamshire, abused more than 30 boys over two decades. Caldicott was among 130 British independent schools, later identified by this newspaper, where staff had been linked to sex crimes involving boys. Teachers at 64 of them were convicted of sexual offences against male pupils.

Luke was outraged that his school was not on the list. He was not the only former pupil of St Paul’s and its prep school, Colet Court, to contact The Times to set the record straight.

Now 59, married and with adult children, he had set out to build a life that wasn’t defined by what happened to him at school. For years he blocked out all recollection of childhood abuse, but psychological wounds festered and 14 years ago the dam burst. Memories erupted and with them came a desire for justice. Luke contacted the police.

By 2000 only one of his three abusers was still alive. Paul Topham was by now an Anglican priest. In a police interview, Luke described lying in his dormitory bed on evenings when Topham was duty master. As dorm monitor, Luke’s bed was closest to the door and the light switch. Topham invariably entered the room, switched off the lights and then sat on Luke’s bed. In the dark, his hand reached under the boy’s bedclothes.

The child lay frozen with shame and confusion. He told no one, nor was there any discussion among the boys of Topham’s far more public assaults when Colet Court boarders were sent at weekends to use the senior school swimming pool. Swimming naked was compulsory. “If Topham was supervising, he’d be in the water in his turquoise shorts. If you rested against the side of the pool, he’d swim up from behind and rub himself against you.”

His abuser set out to befriend Luke’s parents. During school holidays he would often “pop by for a sherry”. Luke said: “He tainted the only safe place I had.”

The officer investigating his complaint of abuse told Luke that Topham was questioned under caution in 2000. He denied every allegation. No charges were brought. He died in 2012.

It was already too late to hold a second abuser to account: Luke’s former housemaster, known as “Alex” Alexander, was dead. Naughty boys were summoned to his study for a beating, then asked to select the weapon — a slipper, hairbrush or plimsoll. Boys pulled down their pyjamas, then bent over a chair. Afterwards, the housemaster would sit the miscreant on his lap, give him toffees as a treat, then shower the child with physical affection. “At the time, I didn’t realise what was happening. I just remember being cuddled and feeling puzzled because he’d always end up going very red in the face.”

Luke’s abuse by Alan Doggett, Colet Court’s director of music, was a once-only indecent assault during the boy’s compulsory audition for the choir.

A far worse fate awaited another boy in his dormitory, a year younger than Luke, who was angelic in both voice and looks. He was Doggett’s chosen one, summoned far too often from their dormitory to spend long hours at night in the choirmaster’s bedroom.

A year later, another boy cried foul and Doggett was forced to resign, though his crimes are understood to have gone unreported by St Paul’s. As a result, it was a decade before he finally appeared in court, charged with offences against a ten-year-old choirboy, born in the year the teacher left Colet Court.

Twice, in 2000 and earlier this year, Luke contacted St Paul’s to ask if it had support mechanisms for victims of historical abuse at the school. Each time, he says, he was told there was no such provision, though St Paul’s last week suggested a meeting to discuss how he might be helped to achieve “closure”.

The former pupil’s name has been changed to protect his identity.

Friends to stars had easy access to boys (25.03.14)

The Times, 25th March 2014

by Andrew Norfolk

Colet Court building in West London

Many hundreds would be a modest estimate of the number of young boys with whom Alan Doggett was allowed close contact after his suspected abuse of a pupil came to the attention of St Paul’s School.

Quietly removed from his post at Colet Court, the future member of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) went on to teach boys at a second independent school before working as a choirmaster with boys from more than 30 London schools.

A decade after his departure from Colet Court, the 41-year-old threw himself in front of a train a few hours after appearing in court, accused of twice indecently assaulting a child aged 10. Doggett’s bail conditions barred any further contact with his choirboys.

In the 17 years preceding his 1978 suicide, he worked almost daily with pre-adolescent boys. He was a gifted but weak man, surrounded by temptation.

Doggett was a former pupil of Colet Court and St Paul’s who returned to the prep school as director of music from 1963 to 1968, having previously taught the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber at Westminster Under School, the junior division of Westminster School.

A regular guest at the Lloyd Webber household, he became friendly with Julian’s elder brother, Andrew, and in the summer of 1967 invited the fledgeling Tim Rice-Lloyd Webber songwriting partnership to pen a pop cantata for an end-of-term school concert.

Rice was then 22, Lloyd Webber 19, and from that invitation Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was born. Its first performance was in March 1968 at Colet Court. Four months later, Doggett conducted the first recording of Joseph, at EMI’s Abbey Road, again featuring boys in the prep school choir.

Allegations of sexual misconduct with a pupil led to his dismissal in the same year but by 1969 he was again teaching music to boys, this time at the City of London School.

Doggett’s association with Rice and Lloyd Webber continued until 1976. He was principal conductor on the original recording of Jesus Christ Superstar and directed the London Boy Singers — a choir whose first president was Benjamin Britten — in his role as “musical co-ordinator” for the first Evita album. As the choir’s reputation grew, he took his boys on European tours. They performed for the Pope, appeared on radio and television, recorded albums and performed in films. Doggett’s death came 15 days before he was due to conduct a massed choir of 1,000 schoolboys — all personally selected and coached — at the Royal Albert Hall. Police had been planning to interview every boy.

A farewell letter explained that in life he had chosen “the way of the Greek”, which “though hard is best”. Days later, Rice and Lloyd Webber issued a joint statement: “Alan was a music and singing teacher of extraordinary talent. We have lost a gifted colleague and a dear friend.”

Rice spoke at the funeral. In his 1999 autobiography, he wrote: “I cannot believe that Alan was truly a danger, or even a minor menace, to the many boys he worked with over the years. It has been known for young boys . . . to manufacture or exaggerate incidents when they know and disapprove of a teacher’s inclinations.”

Lloyd Webber was said by a biographer to remain convinced that “Doggett would never have been guilty of taking advantage of any young person in his charge”.

After his death, an edition of Magpie, the newsletter for the PIE pressure group that campaigned on behalf of paedophiles, revealed that a requiem Mass was said for Doggett by a Catholic priest, Michael Ingram, at a church in Leicester. Twenty-four years later, in 2002, Ingram was convicted of multiple sex offences between 1970 and 1978 against six boys aged from 9 to 12.

PIE’s treasurer, Paul Andrews, wrote that Doggett killed himself after being “accused of indecency with a 10-year-old boy”, adding that he could “well imagine the innocence with which this act of love and affection had taken place”.

Ian Pace, a professional pianist, City University lecturer and campaigner against abuse in musical education, last night demanded a “proper investigation” of Doggett’s continued access to boys after his offending was first exposed at the prep school. “It is rare for such abusers to have merely a few isolated victims,” he said. “The potential implications of this are alarming.”

Boys punished for telling of abuse by teacher (28.3.14)

The Times, 28th March 2014

By Andrew Norfolk

The headmaster of an elite preparatory school punished two pupils for their “wickedness” in reporting serial sexual abuse by a paedophile schoolmaster.

Both were given detention after complaining of indecent assaults regularly committed against boarders at Colet Court, the junior division of St Paul’s School, by its director of music, Alan Doggett.

Doggett, a close friend of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, later became a member of Paedophile Information Exchange, which campaigned in the 1970s to lower the age of consent to 4. Doggett committed suicide when he was charged with sex crimes against another boy, ten years after leaving the prep school.

Many former pupils of Colet Court and St Paul’s, which share a campus in Barnes, southwest London, contacted The Times this week after it was revealed that at least six former teachers, including Doggett, were implicated in numerous sex crimes from the 1960s to the 1980s.

One suspect, Patrick Marshall, 65, who taught at St Paul’s in the late 1970s, was arrested last month and has been bailed pending further police inquiries. He denies any wrongdoing.

Several ex-pupils described Doggett’s routine “fondling” of boys in their beds. Three said they were abused by the choirmaster, who was conductor on the first recordings of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita. Doggett resigned after his abuse was exposed in 1968, but it is understood that St Paul’s did not report the allegations to police or to education officials, which was required by law.

He went on to teach at City of London School and became director of an acclaimed choir before killing himself in 1978.

Stephen (his surname is withheld), the pupil who ended Doggett’s Colet Court career, said that he and a friend decided to speak to the school’s headmaster, Henry Collis, after Doggett indecently assaulted both 11-year-olds as they sat on each side of him during a televised football match in May 1968.

“It was the Manchester United v Benfica European Cup Final. We were sitting on the floor and Doggett’s hands were groping inside our pyjama bottoms.

“He wouldn’t leave us alone. He’d already had a go at me in the dormitory on quite a few occasions,” Stephen said. After the match, the two pupils decided that “he’s got to be stopped”. They informed Mr Collis, who was headmaster of Colet Court from 1957 to 1973 and served as chairman of the Independent Preparatory Schools Association.

Stephen said: “When I next went home on exeat that weekend, the school had telephoned my father to complain that I’d made up terrible stories about Doggett. Dad asked me what had been going on. When I told him, he said he believed me and I’d done the right thing in speaking out, but when I got back to the school the two of us were summoned to Mr Collis’s study.

“I can still see us standing in front of his desk on the Monday morning.He was furious. He said we were wicked for making up such awful lies. Mr Doggett was so appalled and embarrassed by the disgraceful things we’d said that he’d decided to leave the school. We should be thoroughly ashamed of ourselves. He gave us detention.”

Stephen said that another boy in their year suffered far worse crimes at Doggett’s hands: “He had one particular favourite who received regular visits in the dormitory at night. He’d abuse the poor boy without seeming to care that we could all see and watch what was happening.”

Other ex-pupils spoke this week of open gossip among the boys that “half a crown” was the “going rate for a session with Doggett”. One said that his year group even coined a new verb: to be “Doggoed” was to be groped and fondled.

Doggett’s resignation was one of several occasions when St Paul’s allegedly failed to inform police after concerns were raised about sexual misconduct by teachers. Three ex-pupils named Stephen Hale, who taught at Bedford School before joining St Paul’s in the mid-1980s, as the unidentified teacher who was forced to resign after sado-masochistic pornography and a spanking register were found in his room by a school cleaner. The incident was reported in this newspaper on Tuesday.

Inquiries have established that Mr Hale, a maths teacher and boardinghouse tutor, left the school in June 1987, a day after the discovery. St Paul’s merely told the Department for Education that Mr Hale agreed to resign after breaking its rules on corporal punishment. No suggestion was made of any sexual impropriety. As a result, he was not placed on the national list of teachers barred from working with children. His whereabouts are unknown In a statement earlier this week, St Paul’s described all child abuse as abhorrent and stressed that its current arrangements for pupil safeguarding and welfare are rated as excellent by the Independent Schools Inspectorate.

The school has pledged full co-operation with any investigation into past crimes allegedly committed by teachers who are still alive.

Police look into ‘decades of abuse’ at top school; Teacher arrested as police look into ‘decades of abuse’ at school (9.4.14)

The Times, April 9th 2014

By Andrew Norfolk

Police have begun a criminal inquiry into decades of alleged sexual abuse at a top boys’ public school, as it emerged that a current teacher was arrested just six months ago for possessing indecent images of children.

The inquiry into St Paul’s School in London, and its prep school, Colet Court, come after revelations in The Times last month that prompted former pupils to contact police.

So many complaints have been made during the past fortnight that officers are investigating more than six “persons of interest” who taught at the school, whose alumni include George Osborne, the Chancellor.

The officer leading the inquiry said that it had spiralled rapidly into “a complex investigation with further victims, witnesses and suspects being identified on an almost daily basis”.

Detective Inspector Jon Rhodes also appealed for more witnesses to “come forward if they have information”.

The Metropolitan Police said in a statement: “We can confirm that the child abuse investigation team is investigating historic allegations of sexual abuse alleged to have taken place between the 1960s and 1980s. We are aware of a number of potential victims and witnesses we wish to speak to over the course of the investigation.”

It can be revealed that Colet Court’s director of administration, a classics teacher at the preparatory school for more than 20 years, resigned during the current academic year after his arrest on suspicion of possessing child abuse images.

Anthony Fuggle, 57, has been questioned and released on bail. Police were alerted in September after photographs of boys and “inappropriate written material” were found on a school computer during routine IT checks.

A file on the case is with the Crown Prosecution Service. Mr Fuggle was unavailable for comment.

A meeting was held on Friday between police and the school’s current leadership team, at which St Paul’s pledged its full co-operation to the inquiry and its belief that any former employee guilty of child-sex offences should face justice. Letters and e-mails Continued on page 8, col 3 Continued from page 1 were sent last week to parents of boys at St Paul’s and Colet Court and also to former pupils who are members of the Old Pauline Club.

Two weeks ago, this newspaper revealed that six former teachers at St Paul’s and its prep school, which share a campus in Barnes, southwest London, were suspected of sexually assaulting boys from the mid 1960s to the late 1980s.

Students in that era included Mr Osborne, who was at Colet Court and St Paul’s in the 1980s, and Dominic Grieve, QC, the Attorney-General, a pupil at the prep school in the 1960s. There is no suggestion that either was abused as a schoolboy.

Former pupils subsequently contacted this newspaper to accuse more ex-members of staff of sexual misconduct. In total, abuse allegations have been made to The Times against 13 schoolmasters, five of whom taught at St Paul’s and eight at Colet Court. Six of the men are known or thought to be dead.

Offences are said to have been committed against pupils aged 9 to 17, ranging from indecent assaults, voyeurism and sexually motivated beatings to boys being groomed by a teacher who later paid them for penetrative sex.

In two of the 13 cases, at least five ex-pupils have separately made allegations against the same teacher. Former pupils initially came forward in January after St Paul’s was not named in a news article listing 130 British independent schools linked to the abuse of hundreds of boys.

A month later, police began a criminal inquiry into a complaint made by an ex-pupil against a former teacher, Patrick Marshall, alleging sexual offences in the late 1970s.

Mr Marshall, 65, who taught geography and coached rowing at St Paul’s, was arrested and released on bail pending further inquiries. He denies wrongdoing.

Liz Dux, a lawyer specialising in abuse cases, said that no independent school of St Paul’s status and academic reputation had faced such wide-ranging allegations.

Her firm, Slater & Gordon, whose clients include more than 140 alleged victims of Jimmy Savile, represents an ex-pupil who claims to have been sexually abused at St Paul’s in the 1970s.

Ms Dux said that it was “already clear that some of these complaints were known about by other members of staff at the time”. She voiced concern about the adequacy of the school’s response when allegations were brought to its attention during the years that are under police investigation.

The school said yesterday that it was working with the police to ensure that any former teachers who failed in their “heavy duty of responsibility for the well-being of pupils” were held accountable, whether for offences “50 years ago or more recently”.

A spokesman said: “We have direct access to the investigative team, and all allegations of historic abuse which are brought to our attention are forwarded immediately to them.”

Abuse claims against 18 teachers by ex-pupils at top public school; St Paul’s co-operates with police inquiry led by head of Savile investigation (1.5.14)

The Times, May 1st 2014

By Andrew Norfolk

A team of specialist Scotland Yard detectives led by the officer who headed the Jimmy Savile inquiry is to investigate claims that up to 18 paedophile teachers may have abused dozens of boys for several decades at one of Britain’s most famous public schools.

The move comes after a series of complaints from former pupils who say that they fell victim to sex crimes by staff at St Paul’s School, in London, or its preparatory school, Colet Court.

Triggered by revelations in The Times, multiple allegations have been made to police in recent weeks against numerous former schoolmasters, ten of whom taught at Colet Court and eight at St Paul’s. Some are no longer alive.

Detectives have compiled a list of more than 100 victims, suspects and potential witnesses.

Alleged sex offences at the two schools span five decades, from the mid-1960s to last year. A source close to the inquiry, Operation Winthorpe, described its scope as huge.

The new investigation will be under the command of Detective Superintendent David Gray, who led the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Yewtree investigation into the alleged sex crimes of Savile and other celebrities, including Max Clifford.

Mr Gray, head of Scotland Yard’s paedophile unit, said that police intended to carry out “a thorough and transparent review of non-recent offending at the two schools”, which share a campus in Barnes, southwest London.

“The investigation will be conducted by a dedicated team of specially trained officers who have experience of historic child abuse investigations and are sensitive to the needs of victims.” A telephone hotline and email address have been set up, to enable former pupils to contact the inquiry team.

Pat Marshall, 65, a former St Paul’s master, was arrested in February on suspicion of indecently assaulting a pupil in the 1970s. He denies any wrongdoing. His ex-colleague, Keith Perry, 70, received a suspended prison sentence in the same month for possessing hundreds of extreme child abuse images.

A Colet Court teacher, Anthony Fuggle, 57, was arrested last September on suspicion of possessing indecent images of boys, said to have been found on a school computer. He is on bail.

It can be revealed today that a second teacher at the prep school was also arrested last year, on suspicion of sexually grooming a child. Tim Harbord, 61, was not charged with any offence and denies any misconduct. He and Mr Fuggle both resigned during the current academic year.

Crimes, ranging from indecent assaults to penetrative sex, are said to have been committed by 18 teachers against boys aged from 9 to 17, in dormitories, classrooms, a swimming pool, inside a car and at teachers’ private homes. Much of the offending is alleged to have happened between the 1960s and 1990.

Pupils at one or both schools during the era under investigation included the chancellor, George Osborne, the attorney general, Dominic Grieve, QC, and the actor, Eddie Redmayne. There is no suggestion that they were abused as schoolboys.

Detective Sergeant James Townly, who has day-to-day control of Operation Winthorpe, said that former pupils who were the victims of sexual abuse were being placed “at the centre of our work”. Anyone who comes forward will “receive assistance and appropriate support”.

“We’ve already spoken to a number of complainants and there are many other people we need to contact to build a full picture of the alleged offending over several decades. It will obviously take some time for the police to work through all those names.”

St Paul’s, founded in 1509, says that the safeguarding and welfare of pupils is its highest priority.

The school has pledged full co-operation with the investigation and called for all living suspects to be “subjected to the proper processes of justice”, whether for offences 50 years ago or more recently.

Accused teacher kept on working for 24 years

The Times, May 1st 2014

By Andrew Norfolk

A teacher kept his job at a leading school for 24 years after he was accused of fondling a young boy in a classroom, it has been alleged.

Tim Harbord, who taught at Colet Court, the junior division of St Paul’s School, London, finally left at Christmas after a criminal investigation was triggered by a complaint from the parents of a current pupil. They contacted the preparatory school’s headmaster last year to return a jacket sent by the teacher to their son as a present.

Mr Harbord, 61, was arrested and questioned by police in June on suspicion of the sexual grooming of a child. He was not charged with any offence but resigned after receiving a final written warning from the school.

The Times has been told that more than two decades earlier, in 1990, a former Colet Court headmaster failed to take action against the teacher when a mother disclosed her ten-year-old son’s alleged ordeal at his hands. The former pupil, now 34, recently contacted police to add his complaint to a list of allegations against former teachers at St Paul’s or Colet Court.

Mr Harbord, who denies any sexual misconduct, is the second Colet Court master to leave abruptly during the current academic year. Anthony Fuggle, 57, a classics teacher for more than 20 years, resigned in September after being arrested on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children. Photographs of boys were said to have been found on a school computer.

Mr Fuggle remains on bail, pending further police inquiries. Mr Harbord, who coached sport and taught English and history during 28 years at the school, resigned before the start of its spring term in January.

In each case, the current leadership at St Paul’s contacted police and social services when concerns were raised last year. The school allegedly failed to inform child-protection authorities on at least three occasions in the 1960s and 1970s when sexual abuse claims were made against teachers.

The former pupil has told police that on a summer afternoon in 1990, aged ten, he returned to a classroom after lessons to collect a tennis ball and found himself alone with Mr Harbord.

He alleges that the teacher cuddled him before asking him to sit on his lap. He said Mr Harbord began stroking his hair and then his thigh, at which point the child panicked and fled the room.

The ex-pupil said he was so troubled by the incident that he later confided in his sister, swearing her to secrecy. She told their mother, who contacted Billy Howard, the headmaster at the time.

His mother said she gave Mr Howard details of the “totally improper” incident and demanded an assurance “that Mr Harbord was never again going to do anything like that to my son or to anybody else”.

She remembers his response: “He told me that it was very difficult to get male staff in London prep schools who weren’t homosexual. Even at the time, it seemed an extraordinary thing to say. He didn’t propose any action and that seemed to be the end of it as far as he was concerned.” The woman’s son said that until the classroom incident he was very fond of Mr Harbord. “I looked up to him. We all did. He was a ‘cool’ teacher. At the time, people were incredibly naive. What he did to me was brazen but it was completely brushed under the carpet. I’ve never forgotten it.”

Mr Howard’s wife, Heather, told The Times that her husband, 81, “has absolutely no recollection whatsoever” of receiving a complaint of sexual misconduct against Mr Harbord, who was adamant that no such offence took place. Mr Harbord said: “This is so untrue. Nothing happened like this. I’d never sit a boy on my lap in the classroom, stroke his hair. That’s a terrible thing to say.”

He insisted that at no stage of his Colet Court career was he told of any complaint of sexual misconduct against him, but accepted that he had recently been guilty “of naivety” in developing a close relationship with the boy’s family. “I got to know this family well. We did things together, as a family. I shouldn’t have got so close, but nothing sexual went on.”

He said the boy’s mother once sent a card thanking him “for all the affection you’ve shown”, but thought she might have subsequently felt that he was “getting a little bit too close”.

He added: “I was interviewed by the police. They went through all sorts of questions. It was the most despairing time of my life, but then I got a call to say the matter wasn’t going any further.

“There was a formal disciplinary meeting with the headmaster and I had to accept the school policy about gifts and seeing children outside school, and that I mustn’t contact the family. It was very sad because we were very close.”

Mr Harbord said he had no sexual interest in boys. “I’ve always wanted to be married with a family, but I was married to the school.”

In a statement, the school said that Mr Howard, headmaster of Colet Court from 1973 to 1992, “categorically denies any knowledge of the allegations relating to Mr Harbord. He further denies making any remarks about the recruitment of homosexuals to teach in London prep schools.”

Teacher kept job for 16 years after pupils found sex tapes (20.05.14)

The Times, 20th May 2014

By Andrew Norfolk

A paedophile teacher kept his job at a top public school for 16 years after pupils found his collection of indecent videos. Keith Perry taught for 38 years at St Paul’s School, in west London, where a police inquiry began last month into sex crimes allegedly committed against boys by 18 teachers since the 1960s.
Perry was convicted this year after police raided his home last summer and found almost 600 films and photographs showing the abuse of children. In online chat rooms, the “inspirational” former head of history spoke of being sexually obsessed with boys as young as eight.

Perry, 71, who retired in 2003, escaped a jail sentence after it was claimed in court that his addiction to the “utterly repellent” images was a recent lapse by a man of “exemplary character”.

It can be revealed today, however, that Perry’s viewing tastes were discovered in 1986, when boys in a St Paul’s boarding house found a collection of videos hidden behind a row of books in his study, where he often entertained pupils. It was always kept unlocked.

A former pupil told The Times that in Perry’s absence he and a small group of boarders watched an excerpt from one of the films. He said it showed a weeping boy, aged about 13, sitting naked on a chair. The child was instructed to perform a sex act.

Inquiries by The Times confirm the boy’s recollection of having been so disturbed by the video that he reported it to a teacher, who told the school’s senior management of the alleged discovery of “homosexual pornographic videos” in the assistant housemaster’s study.

The teacher said the pupil did not give him a detailed description of the video’s content and the school remained unaware of the allegation that some footage included the abuse of children. No investigation was conducted and no formal disciplinary action was taken against Perry.

It is understood that discussions led to Perry being “quietly advised” to move out of the boarding house, which housed 60 pupils aged from 13 to 18. He taught at St Paul’s for a further 16 years.

Operation Winthorpe, a criminal inquiry led by specialist detectives from the Metropolitan police’s paedophile unit, began work last month after former pupils of St Paul’s and its preparatory school, Colet Court, contacted The Times to allege past sexual abuse by a host of teachers.

Crimes under investigation are said to have taken place between the mid-1960s and last year. It is alleged that on several occasions the school failed to report sexual misconduct by staff. Teachers who were asked to leave found jobs at other boys’ schools.

A former St Paul’s teacher told The Times that the school’s child protection failings in past decades reflected “the rather depressing culture of the day” in many British independent schools. Another said: “In those days, protecting the institution from scandal was all-important.”

Perry admitted last week that he kept pornographic films in his study but denied that any featured children. He also denied being asked to leave the boarding house.
St Paul’s said that it was “co-operating fully with the police investigation”.
The possession of indecent images of children did not become a criminal offence in England and Wales until 1988. The police hotline for Operation Winthorpe is 020-7161 0500.

Colet Court and St Paul’s: a culture of child abuse; Andrew Norfolk on how the closed world of Colet Court and St Paul’s schools made possible decades of abuse against boys (20.5.14)

The Times, May 20th 2014

By Andrew Norfolk

SECTION: LIFE

LENGTH: 1740 words

At the height of the 1960s, when London’s pulse was a planet’s heartbeat, sex had just been invented and blessed were the young for they had inherited the world and all the LSD it contained, a nightly ritual was performed within the walls of a large Victorian building on Hammersmith Road whose values belonged to an older, more monotone land, one in which Britain still ruled an Empire, everyone knew their place and good boys did as they were told.

Here, after lights-out, a middle-aged bachelor schoolmaster descended from his room to deliver a cup of tea to his 14-year-old beloved, a child angelic of looks and voice. The teacher would scan the boys’ dormitory before selecting at random another pupil upon whom fell the task of returning the empty cup and saucer to the master’s room once Ganymede’s thirst was quenched.

This was School House, one of two boarding houses at St Paul’s School, an institution that since 1509 had steadily forged an unchallenged reputation for its ability to mould, from the bright offspring of the capital’s aspirational middle classes, young gentlemen fit for Oxbridge and a glittering future.

Across the road from School House stood Colet Court, the junior division of St Paul’s, where director of music Alan Doggett was also fond of nocturnal dorm visits. Here was no faux romance. The same 11-year-old boy lay back passively each evening as the teacher lifted his bedsheets and set busily to work. Fellow pupils sat quietly in the dark, watching. Everyone knew; no one said a word.

A few miles and a million light years away, Carnaby Street may have been swinging as old roads aged rapidly, yet some pillars of the British establishment held firm. None was more a bastion of tradition than the English public school. It inspired fierce loyalty, worshipped the team ethic and demanded high standards of children from whose parents submissive gratitude was expected at their son’s good fortune in winning admission to the hallowed privilege for which they were paying so handsomely.

Delight was taken in arcane terminology and age-old customs, their purpose long since lost to the mists of time. In classroom, playing field and dormitory, a master’s word was law, sneaking was for plebs and outsiders were viewed with polite but barely concealed contempt. Girls were a foreign country and secrets, even the darkest, were made for keeping. A man could do mischief here; some did.

Attitudes towards child sexual abuse in Britain are a long road slowly travelled. There was a time when no one looked behind a family’s front door; when a Catholic priest’s moral conduct was deemed irreproachable; when children in care were invisible; when what some celebrities did to underage girls was par for the course; when a pro-paedophile group won affiliation to a civil rights organisation while seeking to lower the age of consent to four; when men in the back streets of towns such as Rochdale groomed and sold children for sex while police and social services stood by and shrugged their shoulders.

Conspiracies of silence and complacency were eventually broken, lids lifted, victims given a voice. Eventually, sometimes decades after they plundered childhoods, guilty men were held to account. As each abuse model was exposed, it was asked how such crimes could have run unchecked for so long. In part the answer was chillingly simple: child abuse will flourish when there is an imbalance of power, a setting free from external scrutiny and a culture that plays by its own code. Small surprise, perhaps, that a famous independent school has joined those institutions stung by a long-overdue reckoning for alleged past sins.

There have been public-school scandals in the past, of course, notably those involving England’s three best-known Catholic boarding schools, Ampleforth, Stonyhurst and Downside, and in recent years there has been a steady rise in criminal investigations. In January The Times listed 64 fee-paying boys’ schools at which a male teacher has been convicted of sexually abusing a pupil. The offences dated back to the 1950s, but 62 of the 64 cases were brought to court in the past 20 years, 18 of them since 2012.

The article triggered long-buried memories. Men aged from their thirties to their seventies wrote and phoned in large numbers, seemingly compelled to share their own story. Some spoke of their abuse for the first time; a few broke down. Here were decades of unresolved shame, anger and confusion. Allegations were made against staff at 41 independent schools, of which 26 were not on our original list of 64. There was usually one alleged offender but the case of St Paul’s – two former pupils separately named four teachers – seemed on a different scale.

In March The Times implicated six former teachers at Colet Court or St Paul’s in alleged sex crimes against boys. By then a low-key police investigation was already in progress into a complaint by an ex-pupil against one teacher. The article prompted a surge of calls to the newspaper, the school and the police. Last month, a specialist team of detectives was set up to lead Operation Winthorpe. They have already recorded complaints against 18 former members of staff at the two schools, some no longer alive. The number of victims, suspects – spanning 50 years, from the mid-1960s to last year – and potential witnesses has passed 200.

Handed a list of England’s oldest and most famous public schools, few would have tipped St Paul’s to be the one to face such extensive allegations. A boarding establishment in a remote rural setting more easily fits the profile than a big London school with a rapier-sharp academic reputation and very few boarders.

Yet it was here, along Hammersmith Road until 1968 and since then at the school’s current location in Barnes, southwest London, that a culture is said to have arisen in which some masters, no matter how effective in sculpting young minds for examination success, treated children shamefully. Tales abound until the 1980s of sadistic violence, cruel bullying and of sexual attacks ranging from minor indecent assaults to extended, intimate relationships.

Teachers are accused of offences in dormitories, classrooms, the swimming pool, their own homes, even in cars. There was a period in the late Sixties and early Seventies when, if several former pupils are to be believed, to emerge after five years as a Colet Court boarder without once becoming the means of a teacher’s sexual gratification was to be distinctly fortunate. Some parents were warned that one endured the prep school because the prize was worth it: a place at St Paul’s.

At the senior school, police are examining whether tolerance of adult homosexuality may sometimes have edged dangerously close to turning a blind eye to pederasty. One boy remembers being assured by an avuncular master that homosexuality was a youth cult. In a 1978 suicide note after he was charged with abusing a choirboy, Doggett wrote that he had chosen “the way of the Greek”.

Doggett is one of six Colet Court or St Paul’s teachers who quietly resigned between 1967 and 1987 after suspected sexual misconduct came to light. Not once, it is alleged, did the school call in the police. The late Warwick Hele, high master of the senior school from 1973 to 1986, is remembered by a colleague as “a very good man but not one to stir up trouble unless he had to”. Another described an era when “protecting the institution from scandal was all-important”. For any fee-paying school, gaining a bad reputation could be extremely costly.

That remains the case today, but many outsiders would feel a degree of sympathy for Mark Bailey, St Paul’s highly regarded high master since 2011. His school is suddenly under fire, hit by a blizzard of alleged past misconduct, yet on the two occasions that concerns about teachers are known to have been raised since Bailey has been in post, the school responded swiftly and contacted external child-safeguarding authorities.

Investigations subsequently led to the arrest in 2013 of two long-serving Colet Court teachers, Anthony Fuggle and Tim Harbord, on suspicion of possessing indecent images and of sexual grooming respectively. Each resigned. Harbord has strongly denied any wrongdoing. Neither man has been charged with any criminal offence.

Had such decisive action been taken in response to pre-2011 complaints against teachers, St Paul’s would not be as vulnerable to the damning charge that it formerly seemed less concerned with the protection of children than with the protection of its own good name. The school, which says it is co-operating fully with the police, has described all child abuse as abhorrent and called for anyone guilty of past offences to be held to account. Its current standards of pupil safeguarding and welfare have been rated by inspectors as excellent.

Public reaction to the police inquiry has been instructively varied. Adults whose school years were not spent in similar institutions seem baffled that a world so seemingly careless of child welfare could have existed so recently. Many who were shaped by similar schooling in the same era know only too well that it did; most are nonetheless taken aback by the sheer scale of what is alleged at St Paul’s.

From some ex-public schoolboys, though, comes irritation that such a fuss is being made by chaps who really ought to “man up” and stop making such a hue and cry about a little mild spanking at schools that delivered a first-class education and bred resilience, independence and loyalty into boys who went on to become life’s winners. Some of them now run the country.

Such critics should rewind to the 1970s and a flat near St Paul’s owned by the late Rev Dr Edward Ryan, the school’s under-chaplain and a man who took a close pastoral interest in the vulnerable among his young flock. Boys invited to his home for a chat are said to have been plied with alcohol, then offered cash for penetrative sex. Those who tried to escape sometimes found their way barred.

One of “Doc” Ryan’s junior colleagues, who knew of his regular invitations to pupils but not of any sexual allegations, said he bore all the hallmarks of a predatory paedophile: “I would not have trusted Edward Ryan in the company of a young boy any farther than I could throw him.”

Should Ryan’s victims, some haunted to this day, be expected easily to forgive the school that for so many years gave him such unrestricted access to adolescent boys?

Former Colet Court teacher charged over abuse images (4.6.14)

The Times, June 4th 2014

By Andrew Norfolk

A former teacher at one of England’s most prestigious prep schools is to appear in court accused of possessing child-abuse images.

Anthony Fuggle was a senior classics master at Colet Court, the junior division of St Paul’s School, until he resigned after his arrest last September. Mr Fuggle, 57, who was also the prep school’s director of administration, was charged last night with 11 offences of making indecent images of children and six of possessing indecent images of children. He becomes the first former teacher at St Paul’s or its prep school to be charged under Operation Winthorpe, a criminal inquiry led by a specialist team of Scotland Yard detectives that was launched in April to investigate alleged sexual misconduct involving more than 20 members of staff.

Eighteen ex-teachers, not including Mr Fuggle, have been accused by former pupils of sexually abusing boys at the school over a 50-year period since the mid-1960s. Some are no longer alive. St Paul’s and its junior school share a campus in Barnes, southwest London.

Mr Fuggle was one of two Colet Court teachers to resign during the current academic year. Tim Harbord, 61, left at Christmas after he was arrested on suspicion of sexually grooming a boy. He was released without charge and has strongly denied any wrongdoing.

A former master at St Paul’s, Patrick Marshall, 65, who taught geography and coached rowing, was arrested in February over the suspected abuse of a pupil in the 1970s. He remains on bail.

Mr Fuggle was arrested last autumn after child-protection authorities were contacted by the school. Photographs of young boys were said to have been found during a routine IT check on Colet Court’s computers. He remains on bail and is due to appear before Wimbledon magistrates on June 20.

[A full collection of Andrew Norfolk’s articles on Colet Court, St Paul’s, and Alan Doggett can be read here. My own article on Alan Doggett in its most recent form can be read here]

Colet Court and St Paul’s: a culture of child abuse;
Andrew Norfolk on how the closed world of Colet Court and St Paul’s schools made possible decades of abuse against boys

The Times, May 20th, 2014

At the height of the 1960s, when London’s pulse was a planet’s heartbeat, sex had just been invented and blessed were the young for they had inherited the world and all the LSD it contained, a nightly ritual was performed within the walls of a large Victorian building on Hammersmith Road whose values belonged to an older, more monotone land, one in which Britain still ruled an Empire, everyone knew their place and good boys did as they were told.

Here, after lights-out, a middle-aged bachelor schoolmaster descended from his room to deliver a cup of tea to his 14-year-old beloved, a child angelic of looks and voice. The teacher would scan the boys’ dormitory before selecting at random another pupil upon whom fell the task of returning the empty cup and saucer to the master’s room once Ganymede’s thirst was quenched.

This was School House, one of two boarding houses at St Paul’s School, an institution that since 1509 had steadily forged an unchallenged reputation for its ability to mould, from the bright offspring of the capital’s aspirational middle classes, young gentlemen fit for Oxbridge and a glittering future.

Across the road from School House stood Colet Court, the junior division of St Paul’s, where director of music Alan Doggett was also fond of nocturnal dorm visits. Here was no faux romance. The same 11-year-old boy lay back passively each evening as the teacher lifted his bedsheets and set busily to work. Fellow pupils sat quietly in the dark, watching. Everyone knew; no one said a word.

A few miles and a million light years away, Carnaby Street may have been swinging as old roads aged rapidly, yet some pillars of the British establishment held firm. None was more a bastion of tradition than the English public school. It inspired fierce loyalty, worshipped the team ethic and demanded high standards of children from whose parents submissive gratitude was expected at their son’s good fortune in winning admission to the hallowed privilege for which they were paying so handsomely.

Delight was taken in arcane terminology and age-old customs, their purpose long since lost to the mists of time. In classroom, playing field and dormitory, a master’s word was law, sneaking was for plebs and outsiders were viewed with polite but barely concealed contempt. Girls were a foreign country and secrets, even the darkest, were made for keeping. A man could do mischief here; some did.

Attitudes towards child sexual abuse in Britain are a long road slowly travelled. There was a time when no one looked behind a family’s front door; when a Catholic priest’s moral conduct was deemed irreproachable; when children in care were invisible; when what some celebrities did to underage girls was par for the course; when a pro-paedophile group won affiliation to a civil rights organisation while seeking to lower the age of consent to four; when men in the back streets of towns such as Rochdale groomed and sold children for sex while police and social services stood by and shrugged their shoulders.

Conspiracies of silence and complacency were eventually broken, lids lifted, victims given a voice. Eventually, sometimes decades after they plundered childhoods, guilty men were held to account. As each abuse model was exposed, it was asked how such crimes could have run unchecked for so long. In part the answer was chillingly simple: child abuse will flourish when there is an imbalance of power, a setting free from external scrutiny and a culture that plays by its own code. Small surprise, perhaps, that a famous independent school has joined those institutions stung by a long-overdue reckoning for alleged past sins.

There have been public-school scandals in the past, of course, notably those involving England’s three best-known Catholic boarding schools, Ampleforth, Stonyhurst and Downside, and in recent years there has been a steady rise in criminal investigations. In January The Times listed 64 fee-paying boys’ schools at which a male teacher has been convicted of sexually abusing a pupil. The offences dated back to the 1950s, but 62 of the 64 cases were brought to court in the past 20 years, 18 of them since 2012.

The article triggered long-buried memories. Men aged from their thirties to their seventies wrote and phoned in large numbers, seemingly compelled to share their own story. Some spoke of their abuse for the first time; a few broke down. Here were decades of unresolved shame, anger and confusion. Allegations were made against staff at 41 independent schools, of which 26 were not on our original list of 64. There was usually one alleged offender but the case of St Paul’s – two former pupils separately named four teachers – seemed on a different scale.

In March The Times implicated six former teachers at Colet Court or St Paul’s in alleged sex crimes against boys. By then a low-key police investigation was already in progress into a complaint by an ex-pupil against one teacher. The article prompted a surge of calls to the newspaper, the school and the police. Last month, a specialist team of detectives was set up to lead Operation Winthorpe. They have already recorded complaints against 18 former members of staff at the two schools, some no longer alive. The number of victims, suspects – spanning 50 years, from the mid-1960s to last year – and potential witnesses has passed 200.

Handed a list of England’s oldest and most famous public schools, few would have tipped St Paul’s to be the one to face such extensive allegations. A boarding establishment in a remote rural setting more easily fits the profile than a big London school with a rapier-sharp academic reputation and very few boarders.

Yet it was here, along Hammersmith Road until 1968 and since then at the school’s current location in Barnes, southwest London, that a culture is said to have arisen in which some masters, no matter how effective in sculpting young minds for examination success, treated children shamefully. Tales abound until the 1980s of sadistic violence, cruel bullying and of sexual attacks ranging from minor indecent assaults to extended, intimate relationships.

Teachers are accused of offences in dormitories, classrooms, the swimming pool, their own homes, even in cars. There was a period in the late Sixties and early Seventies when, if several former pupils are to be believed, to emerge after five years as a Colet Court boarder without once becoming the means of a teacher’s sexual gratification was to be distinctly fortunate. Some parents were warned that one endured the prep school because the prize was worth it: a place at St Paul’s.

At the senior school, police are examining whether tolerance of adult homosexuality may sometimes have edged dangerously close to turning a blind eye to pederasty. One boy remembers being assured by an avuncular master that homosexuality was a youth cult. In a 1978 suicide note after he was charged with abusing a choirboy, Doggett wrote that he had chosen “the way of the Greek”.

Doggett is one of six Colet Court or St Paul’s teachers who quietly resigned between 1967 and 1987 after suspected sexual misconduct came to light. Not once, it is alleged, did the school call in the police. The late Warwick Hele, high master of the senior school from 1973 to 1986, is remembered by a colleague as “a very good man but not one to stir up trouble unless he had to”. Another described an era when “protecting the institution from scandal was all-important”. For any fee-paying school, gaining a bad reputation could be extremely costly.

That remains the case today, but many outsiders would feel a degree of sympathy for Mark Bailey, St Paul’s highly regarded high master since 2011. His school is suddenly under fire, hit by a blizzard of alleged past misconduct, yet on the two occasions that concerns about teachers are known to have been raised since Bailey has been in post, the school responded swiftly and contacted external child-safeguarding authorities.

Investigations subsequently led to the arrest in 2013 of two long-serving Colet Court teachers, Anthony Fuggle and Tim Harbord, on suspicion of possessing indecent images and of sexual grooming respectively. Each resigned. Harbord has strongly denied any wrongdoing. Neither man has been charged with any criminal offence.

Had such decisive action been taken in response to pre-2011 complaints against teachers, St Paul’s would not be as vulnerable to the damning charge that it formerly seemed less concerned with the protection of children than with the protection of its own good name. The school, which says it is co-operating fully with the police, has described all child abuse as abhorrent and called for anyone guilty of past offences to be held to account. Its current standards of pupil safeguarding and welfare have been rated by inspectors as excellent.

Public reaction to the police inquiry has been instructively varied. Adults whose school years were not spent in similar institutions seem baffled that a world so seemingly careless of child welfare could have existed so recently. Many who were shaped by similar schooling in the same era know only too well that it did; most are nonetheless taken aback by the sheer scale of what is alleged at St Paul’s.

From some ex-public schoolboys, though, comes irritation that such a fuss is being made by chaps who really ought to “man up” and stop making such a hue and cry about a little mild spanking at schools that delivered a first-class education and bred resilience, independence and loyalty into boys who went on to become life’s winners. Some of them now run the country.

Such critics should rewind to the 1970s and a flat near St Paul’s owned by the late Rev Dr Edward Ryan, the school’s under-chaplain and a man who took a close pastoral interest in the vulnerable among his young flock. Boys invited to his home for a chat are said to have been plied with alcohol, then offered cash for penetrative sex. Those who tried to escape sometimes found their way barred.

One of “Doc” Ryan’s junior colleagues, who knew of his regular invitations to pupils but not of any sexual allegations, said he bore all the hallmarks of a predatory paedophile: “I would not have trusted Edward Ryan in the company of a young boy any farther than I could throw him.”

Should Ryan’s victims, some haunted to this day, be expected easily to forgive the school that for so many years gave him such unrestricted access to adolescent boys?

I am in the process of preparing longer bibliographies of both published and online articles relating to issues of institutionalised abuse, specifically the areas on which I have concentrated – abuse in music schools and private schools, the Paedophile Information Exchange, and abuse involving politicians. Having recently reblogged a large number of articles from the Spotlight blog, I realise my site may not be so easy to navigate, so I am providing here a list with links of all my significant original articles.

When I was at school, education could go hang. As long as a boy could hit a six, sing the school song very loud and take hot crumpet from behind without blubbing. (Lieutenant George in Blackadder Goes Forth)

But beyond the obviously wrong phenomenon of sexual abuse of pupils by teachers, these schools facilitate and nurture a culture of abuse, vicious bullying, violence, and ruthless determination to get to the top and trample on whoever might get in one’s ways, with little place for empathy, compassion, collectivity and much else. Whilst it may be harder today for schools to cover up sexual abuse, I have seen little reason to believe all the other types of abuse and cruelty, whether from teachers towards pupils, or pupils towards other pupils, are necessarily much diminished. Alex Renton captures some of this culture; I plan to blog more on this subject, and the insidious effect upon British society of the public school system and the apartheid-like model of education it entails when time permits.

For now, though I want to offer one thought for consideration: the majority of those who study or have studied at these schools, two options are available, those of perpetrator or victim. Either (a) one can assume upon oneself the values of those schools and their associated cultures, and become a type of neo-fascist oneself, or (b) hold out personally against them, and end up becoming a victim and fucked-up for life. There will be a few who manage to eschew either option, but for many, the choice is stark. The advantages of (a) enable the brutalising culture of the public schools to be passed down from generation to generation, and to inform the workings of many of the higher echelons of society, most of them dominated by public school pupils. Some people who have served in the military might naturally have absorbed some ruthless and dehumanising values as well, but often linked to a sense of camaraderie and understanding of the importance of collective purpose. In my experience, those latter qualities are mostly absent from those who have absorbed the lessons of public schools. This very educational system serves to enshrine and perpetuate the callousness and brutalism of the British ruling classes; I can see it in written in the faces of more than a few leading politicians.

For generations of boys, sexual abuse was part of the everyday cruelty of boarding school. In this painfully honest report, writer Alex Renton confronts the demons of his past at Ashdown House, where some of Britain’s most powerful men were also educated – and reveals the scale of the outrage about to engulf the private education system

Alex Renton
The Observer, Sunday 4 May 2014

If Ashdown House’s pretty Georgian facade reminds you of Washington’s Capitol and the White House that’s because the architect, Benjamin Latrobe, had a hand in those, too. It is an excellent look for the entrance to a temple of education: it speaks of classical wisdom and the rule of reason. We boys weren’t allowed to go in that way, of course.

Today, 40 years since I last saw the school, we step in through Latrobe’s columned porch as though entitled. Nothing can touch us: we’re parents. Ruth, my wife, grips my hand. A friend who works in post-traumatic stress disorder warned us, quite gravely, of the risks when people visit scenes of past troubles; of hyper-arousal – sweats, nausea, high heart-rate. Or the opposite, hypo-arousal: a state of lethargy, a feeling of unreality. But I’m fine. Pulse steady. People hurt you, not places.

There were no ghosts, no shocks as we toured the corridors and classrooms. I have not been looking forward to the smell. I could summon the brew: disinfectant, boy sweat, meat stew, chalk dust. An incense of misery. But it is gone. There is no chalk these days.

It is the details from other senses that clamour. The give of a floorboard in a corridor, the sunlight through a window, the shape of a wooden refectory bench, an echo of children’s voices. We enter a cosy girls’ dormitory where the low black beams were, suddenly, shockingly familiar. And the brick fireplace. This used to be headmaster “Billy” Williamson’s study. I’d scrutinised those bricks, the way they sat upon each other, many times over those five years. Waiting for his flap-jowled face to stop shouting and get to business: detail the punishment or the beating.

Just down the corridor, two worn wooden steps led to the tiny dormitory where I slept in my first term at the school. I and the other eight-year-olds would turn our faces into our mattresses, pull pillows over our heads. If you wept out loud, the 10-year-old dormitory captain and his deputy threatened to whip you with a belt. That was their prerogative, they told us on the first night, a few hours after our mothers had extracted promises from them to look after their little ones.

The last seems such a cliché of boarding school life – surely the tearful mummy pleading with the bullies is in Tom Brown’s School Days? Or a Michael Palin sketch? – I wonder if I’ve made it up. The memories are blurred. I’m shocked how few of them there are. And telling and retelling the few stories that stand out in bright light carries risks – they gather accretions. Now when I meet men who were at the school I tend to check detail obsessively – He was called what? That happened when? – as if without reaffirmation what was real might slip into the darkness. Old Ashdownians sometimes tell me things that make my jaw drop.

But I do know that after the half-term break that first autumn we came back to a terrifying dressing-down, delivered under those low beams in the headmaster’s study. One of us new boys – I still don’t know who – had complained about the regime in Dormitory V to his parents. This was the cardinal sin. What happened in school stayed in school. Billy punished us all. We didn’t tell tales again.

Some of the key locations have shrunk absurdly small: the brick chapel where Billy gripped the Bible and harangued us with the backing of his three trustiest prefects: Jesus, the Holy Ghost and God. Just as tiny now is the assembly room where, daily, 120 boys aged seven to 13 were ranked on wooden benches. Here the diatribes, the mass punishments and public humiliations happened. This was where he would detail who had cried under the cane the previous night: “Jones and Smith took it like gentlemen. But Renton blubbed like a baby.”

That was then. Now the site is the “play-room”, with a cushioned chill-out area adjoining. The larky 12-year-olds playing pool round a table seem to take up half the space. In the corridor I find a familiar picture, a print of the Pietro Annigoni portrait of the Queen, done after her coronation. She is young, beautiful and brave. I remember I used to watch her during assembly. I would wonder what she would do if she knew how unjustly we, her young subjects, were being treated. I’d will her to descend, glorious like the first Queen Elizabeth, and order Billy and his staff to the Tower. Or, like Boudica, ride down on the teachers and the prefects, slashing them to bits with the spinning swords on her chariot wheels.

The school has prospered since, as has the whole industry: now there are 22 full-time teaching staff. In my time there were only 10 or 12, some of them just graduated, and I wonder how many of them had any qualification at all. There’s a new teaching block, a purpose-built canteen, a swimming pool and a kindergarten.

Lost in this warren is the classroom where, one afternoon when I was nine or 10, a hated and violent young teacher I will call Mr X slipped his hand into my corduroy shorts and tugged at my penis. This was a known hazard – in return Mr X gave you a Rowntree’s fruit gum. Mine was a green one, nobody’s favourite. Is this a memory I can trust? No doubt. I can feel my face against the rough tweed of his jacket, scratchy.

As the visit goes on, corridor after corridor, a sadness grows in my chest. Afterwards, utter exhaustion. I’m very glad, though, to see these rooms now full of light and character.

Especially that. Where our walls were bare and the only softness the identical candlewick bedspreads, now there are teddy bears and family photos; posters of ponies and Chelsea footballers. Peering into classrooms, the children are lively – unnaturally polite, compared with the ones at my daughter’s state primary – but no one looks unhappy. As if they would. I realised I’d sort of expected that. Little rooms full of children with faces like The Scream.

After the tour, there are coffee and biscuits – we’ve come posing as prospective parents – with the headmaster and his wife, a couple in their 40s. They seem kind and practical. We chat about how boarding schools have changed and who from my days stays in touch. Who sends their own children to Ashdown. This stiff conversation is interrupted by a dazed little child who has brought a letter to be sent to his parents.

The headmaster calls him “my dear boy”: when the child stammers what he wants and leaves, the headmaster explains a little, adding that winter is a bad time of year in a new school. We make sympathetic faces. I say that if my daughter comes to the school, she would like not to board immediately. The headmaster nods. That’s fine. Weekly boarding is good, though an initial period of no contact with parents is for the best. One of the boarders, he tells us, is just six years old. That’s been fine, too. His wife nods. At Ashdown now there is, the brochure reassures you, a “warm, kind and trusting home-from-home environment”. No hugs, though.

The little boy’s letter to Mummy, the scrawled envelope barely legible, lies between us on the coffee table among the porcelain like something raw. I remember how the teachers would inspect our letters home, and how we were punished if found to have complained to our parents. In a school of endless rules, offences against omerta were perhaps the most seriously policed of all. Of the platitudes from the current headmaster, only one impresses me: the school likes to encourage “independent thought”. That is a change. This is a very different place altogether.

The last time I set foot in the school was the day I left, aged 13. In the 40 years since, Ashdown has loomed large – it was, as they say, “the making of me”, for better and for worse. But I had not thought of revisiting. Except once, aged 15. Then a group of boys at Eton and I had discussed whether we might charter a mini-bus and visit the grave of the newly deceased Billy Williamson, to dance on it. It never happened. But the thought was good.

With the headmaster’s death, Ashdown House and its demons began to fade. A young teacher, one of the decent ones, became headmaster, introduced girls and abolished the cane. The stories of baroque cruelty and insane adult behaviour became jokes, used to bond with people who’d been through the system at other schools. There was a time when the stories were fun to use to horrify girls, and another when they could serve to excuse your own emotional screw-ups. They were war stories: they made us feel special.

Sympathy in the wider world was limited. It still is. We were toffs whose parents had paid for the luxury of having their children abused – we were hardly the survivors of the care homes of north Wales or Catholic church vestries. We were not noisy: we kept calm and carried on, as trained. Some of us would later untangle the memories in therapy.

There has clearly been some demand for that. By the 1990s this odd corner of the British ruling class’s mechanisms had become a subject of academic study and the grounds of psychiatric careers. Now Boarding School Syndrome has a symptomology, “survivors’ groups” and it’s a thriving area for counsellors and psychotherapists. Private, of course. Money buys you entry: a friend who works in psychological trauma in the NHS says she’s never come across this particular field.

The story of the British boarding school and its experiences have been widely written, as one might expect. Reading the raw accounts in the recent press and on abuse survivors’ web fora I find myself flinching a little at how nicely turned some of the accounts are: like the lesser poets of the First World War, the emotional effects are just a touch self-conscious, the result, probably, of too much Wordsworth and Keats in the Fourth Form. Strange, to educate people to go out and be cannon fodder, but also to describe the experience like a Romantic.

Most of the professional memoirists seem to have ended up accommodating their boarding school experience: “Hell, but it made me the man/woman I am.” Some who loathed their school days end up endorsing the system. Among these are Winston Churchill and Richard Dawkins. In his new autobiography, the scientist reckons the “mild paedophilia” he encountered was of its time and thus acceptable. ‘I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours,” he has said.

Far from condemning, others acknowledge they owe their careers to the emotional catastrophe of their education. Generations of male, middle-class British comedians’ currency is the dry, dark humour that comes straight from the coping mechanisms of upper-class suffering. The other day, Eddie Izzard spoke of how he was sent to board at seven, shortly after his mother’ death. He “cried relentlessly for a year… My housemaster would help me along with beatings when he could fit them in.”

That brand of wry fatalism is characteristic. My wife Ruth did not go to boarding school. She says she cannot stand it when people who did talk through their experiences in “endless infantile grim jokes”. But modern British culture has swallowed the boarding school story and digested it, caring not very much. It was an anachronism, a hangover of the imperial age, and in the 1990s, it looked as though the boarding schools were dying out. Numbers of boarders were collapsing.

Then new money and changing fashion brought about a curious revival. Another generation of the rich started sending their children away again. Once again, the little ones demanded it, they said, because of the books they had been reading. Only this time, the propaganda wasn’t Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers or Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings but JK Rowling (who did not go to boarding school and doesn’t send her own children to one). Perhaps Harry Potter revived the English boarding school: numbers of boarding children have stayed stable since 2000 and through the recession. There’s about 70,000 of them. As far as I can work out, around 4,000 of those are 10 or younger.

Now, of course, the country has had four years of its own experience of the effects of boarding school. The majority of the 2010 coalition cabinet were privately educated, most of them as boarders. Boris Johnson went to my schools – Ashdown and then Eton, and Andrew Mitchell, the former chief whip, went to Ashdown before going to Rugby. Of course, there’s never been a government, even a Labour one, in which privately educated people were not among the major players. But, as critics like to point out, this clutch of male ruling politicians embodies the grand Victorian public school virtues – or failings – more than most: suppression of emotion, devotion to the team, distrust of women and minimal empathy for the weak and ordinary.

And so it is interesting that so many senior politicians in government went to boarding schools, places that, by definition, practise on young children the techniques of “attachment fracture” – a psychiatrist’s phrase – that are key to removing early emotional ties and building esprit de corps. Of those politicians quite a few – including the chancellor, the prime minister and deputy prime minister, the Mayor of London and the Attorney General – were at private schools where teachers from their era have been accused or convicted of sexual abuse. The coalition is quite an advert for the old way.

For two decades there has been talk of an enormous abuse scandal brewing behind the facade of the 20th-century British private education system. Last December the story sprang to life. A long-running case against Peter Wright, the 83-year-old former headmaster of a school in Buckinghamshire called Caldicott, came to an end. Wright was found guilty of 12 counts of sexual abuse: one of the piquant details was that Nick Clegg had been joint head-boy at the school; his colleague, the other head boy, was one of the principal witnesses against Wright.

He had first been charged 10 years’ earlier. A judge threw out the case because the offences were “historical”. When the trial that finally went ahead in 2013, some of the 1960s allegations were not admitted. (Wright has now been jailed for eight years, having been found guilty of 10 indecent assaults and two counts of gross indecency, between 1959 and 1970). At least 30 pupils were involved, according to one newspaper. Five other teachers were implicated, one of whom threw himself under a tube train before the trial. One Caldicott teacher, sacked in 1972, went on to teach and abuse at the Harrodian School: the law did not catch up with him until 2003. Another abused children at Caldicott and a school in Shropshire in the 1970s and 1980s and was finally jailed this February. There is, not for the first time, talk of a “ring” of paedophile teachers operating in the 1970s in prep schools and public schools.

With the Wright case done, the principle that ancient allegations could be successfully prosecuted was established. It was certain more would follow. In mid-January the Times’s hard-working reporter of child abuse scandals, Andrew Norfolk, wrote of a “surge in criminal prosecutions” and named 130 private schools who have been or are now subject to similar allegations. That was 5% of all in the UK. It included 50 in the independent schools’ premier league, the Headmaster’s Conference. Twenty of them were feeders to Eton. In the same story, Norfolk pointed out that teachers from 62 different private schools had been convicted of sex crimes against children in the past 20 years – 18 convictions since 2012. Norfolk called it “stealing their childhoods”.

This all passed me by, until, last December, a story appeared in the Times naming Ashdown House under the headline “Prep school faces claims of physical and sexual abuse.” The Daily Mail was gripped, because Ashdown in the 70s had not just been the school of Boris Johnson but also the actor Damian Lewis and the Queen’s nephew David Linley. Linley was my contemporary – in the Mail he was quoted reminiscing without any affection about the “Dickensian” school. He remembered Billy Williamson caning his whole class for one child’s “fairly petty” offence.

The old man did like a big gesture. I remember him – huge, red-faced, ranting – threatening to cane the entire school unless a boy owned up to some particularly infuriating crime. I think it was a broken window. An older Ashdownian told me Billy had actually once attempted that feat – giving 120 boys “six of the best” in one afternoon. Despite being a keen golfer with a good swing, which he practised on the Royal Ashdown course most weekends, Williamson ran out of steam. He gave up having got through hardly half of them.

But the new allegations were about more than caning, which was a legal practice in independent schools in England and Wales until 1999. (About the same time, the independent schools for the first time became subject to full state inspection.) The Mail story talked of “horrific attacks” by two teachers in the early and mid-70s. The paper had been leaked details of a campaign for compensation started by former pupils, in part because they were infuriated that a complaint about abuse made in 2003 had been brushed aside. This group had been taken on as no-win-no-fee clients by the solicitors representing some victims of Jimmy Savile.

Through friends who had also been at Ashdown, I got more detail. The complaints, from a group a few years younger than me, were indeed horrific: sexual acts much more intrusive than Mr X’s pathetic bribe and fumblings. There was talk of blackmail and predatory older pupils encouraged by abusive teachers. That chimed with my adult perception of the bizarre sexualisation of life at Ashdown, especially the system of reward and discipline. At least two children I knew who had been given authority over younger kids used it to force sexual contact – Williamson seemed to have turned a blind eye. There was talk of connections with house masters at Eton, to which Ashdown fed pupils. There had been at least one suicide. There were more teachers in the complaint.

The Mail’s story quoted from an email that the former Ashdown pupils were passing around: “The abuse that occurred continues to have a dramatic effect on a number of lives, with regards to ongoing relationships, career and treatment for dealing with the psychological damage it has caused. Therefore we are seeking compensation with regards to a civil case against the school.”

I was very shocked when I read this – more than I could easily understand. Ashdown had had a dramatic effect on my life, too, but I had thought it was done. I didn’t feel any need for revenge or compensation for what had happened 40 years ago. I didn’t think I needed catharsis, either – I had long ago let light onto what I experienced at Ashdown. I was open about it with lovers, friends and family. I was, as much as I could hope to be, at peace.

But I realised I owed support to others who might need revenge, relief from the history – or money. There was another pressing need. The abusers had all been young men, if my memory could be trusted. They could still be teaching. Why hadn’t I acted on Mr X years ago? I could not explain that.

The first thing I did, though, was to email the Daily Mail story to my parents. This was not revenge. That my career at Ashdown was a mistake that they deeply regretted was something we had established a long time ago. If there was anything to forgive, I had forgiven it. I know they loved me. They were victims of a terrible fraud.

Besides, the sexual abuses were, in my version of the story, just detail: the real narrative was of five years of deliberate crushing of our individuality, the suppression of emotional freedom. Sexual bullying seemed just a part of the violence and cruelty that was the basic currency of the school and hundreds like it; the tools with which it squashed our little forms into the mould. Out of it would come upper-class Englishmen and women – ready to go and run an Empire or, at least, take charge of lesser mortals with normal feelings.

So went my thinking. Nothing unfamiliar: it has been said by British liberals from George Orwell onwards. Psychiatrists I have spoken to agree that, yes, while sexual and physical abuse is the headline grabber (and what makes criminal cases), real damage is done to children and adults by long-term psychological abuse. A child may recover from a blow, but not from the withdrawal of love and the denial of safety – the “complex trauma” child psychologists talk of. Comfy with my understanding, I was someone who had dealt with his schooldays.

But then I got an email back from my mother. What she wrote stripped away my reading and intellectualising, like so many useless bandages. She said I had told her about Mr X.

Then I cried. Because that summoned a picture: a small boy, nervous, excited in his new clothes and tie, ready to drive to Ashdown House on a September morning in 1969. My little brother and sisters gathered round to wave me off. A few weeks before I’d sat up late to watch the astronauts land on the moon on the TV. I wanted to be an adventurer, too. This journey seemed like the beginning. I was as brave and trusting as only the innocent can be. I never really trusted an adult again, not until I was one myself.

My mother’s email upended my 52-year-old’s view of my Ashdown self. I’d thought that September day was the last of my bravery. That I had been crushed, totally. In a privately published book of appreciation given to Billy Williamson for some anniversary shortly before his death in 1976, there is a selection of some pupils’ prize-winning work. It includes a story I wrote when I was 12.

It’s a plain account of a self-centred little boy who is given a rabbit for his birthday. The novelty wears off, the boy, careless and cruel, fails to clean the hutch or feed the rabbit. His mother warns him to look after it better; he punishes the rabbit by throwing mud and stones at it. When eventually it dies, he weeps as he buries it. But then a few days later, when a fox digs up the rabbit’s corpse, he doesn’t notice. “Nor were the flowers on its grave ever renewed,” is the last phrase.

That story of the selfish little boy and the all-knowing adults has long seemed to me as good a totem as any to show that the school had done the job it was paid for. Ashdown had broken me, as you do when you train an animal, and then drilled me until I was a suitable citizen. But my mother’s revelation showed I had kicked back. In fact, I had broken the most important of all of Billy’s rules. I had told tales out of school. l specifically said a teacher was touching me in a way I didn’t like and that I “hated” him. And she had gone straight to the school to raise hell with the headmaster’s wife.

That may explain Mr X’s disappearance shortly after (to teach at another school, according to the Ashdown School Bulletin of that year). It may explain the way the headmaster targeted me in the following years, singling me out in front of the school as a fraud, a failure and a perpetrator of “filthy behaviour”. But it gave me a new vision of the brave little boy who wouldn’t be cowed by Billy Williamson: the boy who spoke out.

And so I thought of those others, today and in the past, at Ashdown and all the other schools who wanted to speak up. I thought of the children in council care homes, in borstals and mental institutions, who over the years were left in thrall to adults without protection. I thought of the ruined marriages, the let-down kids, the suicides, the stunted and miserable lives – the great swathe of collateral damage that psychological trauma leaves. I thought of all the kids taken from their homes too early and thus denied, as the writer David Thomas once put it, the chance to love.

I thought particularly of the 45,000 under-10s in the UK who are in local authority care today. Of the 2,000 or so kids nine or younger – too young, according to any child psychologist – whose parents are now sending them to boarding school. For convenience, or notions of status, or just because they did not love them enough, to taking a mad gamble with their children’s emotional health, with their lives. And I thought of all the head-teachers who have protested that schools risk being closed by the legal actions, that that was then and this is now, that the abuses of the old boarding schools could not possibly happen today. I decided to go and see Ashdown. And I decided to talk to the police.

If you have a story you would like to share anonymously, email Alex Renton (alex.renton@observer.co.uk) in total confidence. If you have been affected by the issues in this story, call the National Association for People Abused in Childhood free on 0800 085 3330 from landlines, 3, EE, Vodafone and Virgin mobile phones, or 0808 801 0331 from O2, EE and Vodafone mobile phones.

I would also recommend reading Peter Donohoe’s memories of his years at Chetham’s here, here and here and especially the item on bullying here.

Danczuk and Watson are heroic politicians for our time, both risking huge amounts of approbrium and antipathy from colleagues and others (as Watson has detailed in his tribute to Danczuk). As a campaigner and independent researcher into abuse in musical education and also into PIE (about which numerous earlier blog posts give primary source information) I have had the pleasure to meet with Watson. No words can praise highly enough his complete dedication to these issues, as demostrated earlier with the allegations about the media and phone hacking. A few other MPs have shown courage and determination with these issues: Lucy Powell, Labour MP for Manchester Central, has continued to pursue the issue of abuse in music education and safeguarding (with Chetham’s and the Royal Northern College of Music both lying within her constituency), whilst Conservative MP Tim Loughton, former Children’s Minister, also speaking out about the scale of organised abuse as can be read in a speech he made to Parliament last September detailed here in Hansard.

Current Labour Deputy Leader Harriet Harman MP was Legal Officer for the NCCL from 1978 to 1982; she joined the organisation two years after the Criminal Law Revision Committee submission, but no evidence has yet been provided of her – or her husband, Jack Dromey (who was on the committee of NCCL from 1970 to 1979, and has claimed to have opposed PIE but given no evidence for this) opposing the influence of PIE at the organisation.

How has Harman responded to the latest flurry of press attention? After the story was re-hashed in the Daily Mail in mid-February (having appeared sporadically for several years previously); it had become clearer how deeply PIE were involved with a wide range of abuse scandals, an involvement which has become even clearer in the subsequent months. In particular, the sinister figure of the late Peter Righton (files relating to whom provided the impetus for the police investigations which opened in 2012 – see also this 1994 documentary), who weaned his way to influential positions in the social work profession, was a high-up member of PIE, and has been linked to a network of abusers in public schools and to a range of cases of abuse in children’s homes; one victim has linked Righton to Cyril Smith (Smith may have met Righton when he was Liberal spokesperson on social services from 1976 to 1977). The journalist Eileen Fairweather, who broke the story of widespread abuse in Islington children’s homes for the Evening Standard, wrote of how one woman recalled being told openly by Righton at a social function in the 1970s how he enjoyed having sex with boys in children’s homes; Righton apparently assumed that as a lesbian she ‘wouldn’t break ranks’, and the woman went along with what she called ‘a typical gay man’s excuse – that he didn’t use force’ (she later gave a statement to the investigators) (cited in Christian Wolmar, Forgotten Children: The Secret Abuse Scandal in Children’s Homes (London: Vision Paperbacks, 2000)). Righton also wrote an endorsement which was used on the cover of Tom O’Carroll’s book Paedophilia: The Radical Case (ibid). Elsewhere, Fairweather has written of the deep links between Islington Council and PIE.

Harman’s first response was completely defensive: in a statement which was printed in the Mail on February 24th, she referred to the allegations as a ‘smear campaign’, and denied any connection with NCCL policy on lowering the age of consent to ten, or opposing the law on incest, as in the 1976 submission, pointing out that she did not work for NCCL until two years later, and denying that her involvement with NCCL implied any further support for PIE. However, as the paper pointed out, the 1976 submissions remained policy in 1978, when Harman joined, and she does not appear to have raised any objections then; furthermore, the affiliation continued throughout her time as Legal Officer. In a statement published together with Harman’s, Dromey argued that he was ‘at the forefront of repeated public condemnations of PIE and their despicable views’

As the media response grew louder, Harman appears to have realised that this would not be enough, and gave an interview with Laura Kuenssberg for Newsnight, again denying this amounted to anything more than a smear. She pointed out that PIE were one of a thousand organisations affiliated to NCCL, and that any organisation could affiliate. Ed Miliband (in what appears to have been his only statement on the whole controversy) backed Harman absolutely on the same day, reiterating her claim that the story amounted purely to a smear (Sam Coates, ‘Miliband backs Harman over ‘paedophile smears’, The Times, February 25th, 2014). It was later revealed that Harman and Dromey may not have been so confident about what journalists might find, and they trawled the NCCL archives in Hull themselves (their names can be found in the ledgers) on February 24th, five days after the story broke, and on the same day as the Newsnight interview. The Mail responded by pointing out that in the year when Harman joined the organisation, PIE was listed in the book The NCCL Guide to Your Rights as one of eighteen organisations which ‘may be helpful’ to readers, alongside the likes of the Family Planning Association and Rape Crisis Centre, and also that by 1982, the constitution of an affiliated institution had to be ‘approved by the Committee’ (PIE continued to be affiliated for a further year). The Telegraph also viewed other internal documents that cast serious doubts upon Harman’s claims that PIE had been ‘pushed to the margins’ back in 1976, before she went to NCCL, revealing that NCCL gay-rights spokesperson Nettie Pollard (probably the key link between NCCL and PIE, who has elsewhere herself been named as a member (#70) of PIE) had sat on a fourteen-strong NCCL gay rights committee with PIE chairman Tom O’Carroll (O’Carroll later thanked Pollard for her help in the foreword to his 1980 book Paedophilia: The Radical Case), and printed a letter from Harman forwarding a query from Pollard as to how to table amendments to the Protection of Children Bill in the Lords in 1978; this story was also pursued briefly in The Guardian. At this stage a spokesman for Harman had to concede that Pollard had promoted paedophilia and exploited the gay rights committee. Most damningly, the Mailprinted a copy of the NCCL advert taken out in PIE journal Magpie in 1979 (which I had earlier revealed, though omitted at this stage to mention the earlier 1977 advert in Understanding Paedophilia).

Various of these articles drew attention in particular to how Harman herself urged changes to the 1978 Protection of Children Bill by saying that ‘images of children should only be considered pornographic if it could be proven the subject suffered’; this is perhaps the most crucial piece of information, and which comes dangerously close to PIE-style thinking, by positing that something only becomes pornographic if the child considers it as such (rather than in a statutory fashion). Though Harman protested that this was to stop parents being criminalised for taking beach or bathing pictures of their children (which would in itself be fair), these proposed amendments went further than that, as a lawyer would surely know.

But there was no such humility from Harman, whose public school haughtiness deserves consideration just as does that of David Cameron or George Osborne; in an interview for The Times in early March, she adopted a contemptuous tone, continuing to refuse to apologise, talked about intending to be Deputy Prime Minister, and even talking about how she was ‘spending a lot of money on my hair, which is the same colour as when I was 33 [….] I’m not quite sufficiently politically correct to be able to stop it’, giving the impression that this mattered more than the ongoing stories about abuse (Sam Coates, ‘I want to be deputy PM, says Harman as she stands firm over paedophiles’, The Times, March 8th, 2014).

A civil liberties organisation should defend the civil liberties of all people, including those whose views they might otherwise despise and reject. The American Civil Liberties Union has defended the right to free speech of the Klu Klux Klan; in my view, they are absolutely right to do so, for using fascistic techniques of censorship is no way to combat fascist ideology and organisations. Paedophiles have rights and civil liberties as well (and I have no interest in debating with those people who would deny that they do); were the NCCL simply to be defending these, or indeed fighting against the rather archaic law of ‘Conspiracy to Corrupt Public Morals’, then their actions should be applauded. Furthermore, it would be rash to censor even a debate on the precise age of consent, which varies slightly between different Western countries.

But NCCL’s support for PIE went further than this. I do not believe Harman, Dromey or Hewitt to have been active supporters of the abuse of children themselves; however, at a time when PIE was at its height, they were all intimately involved with an organisation which not only allowed PIE to affiliate (would Harman have been so happy with a group which advocated that a man can beat his wife if she is disobedient, or a fundamentalist Christian anti-gay organisation?), but also advertised in its own deeply unpleasant publications (see the ample amount of material I have published on this blog here, here and here) and appear to have been influenced by aspects of PIE thinking in their policy, as well as having PIE members on their own committees. No clear evidence has been provided for any of these three figures having opposed this, unlike with Peter Hain, say. PIE’s strategy was to infiltrate and influence mainstream gay rights and civil liberties organisations towards their own ends; Harman, Dromey and Hewitt stand as appearing culpable in allowing this to happen, and in the process adding a degree of respectability to that very paedophile movement which looks to have been involved in the worst cases of organised abuse.

As further investigations into the latter continue, it would be a miracle if the involvement of leading PIE members is not evoked on many future occasions, and many more questions asked about just how this organisation and the ideologies it espoused came to win a degree of acceptance especially on the liberal left (two very thoughtful articles on this question have recently been published by Eileen Fairweather and Christian Wolmar). However, all figures associated with the Labour leadership appear to have treated this as an issue primarily of the reputations of Harman and Dromey (Hewitt is less active in politics today and no longer in Parliament). Harman’s own self-centered attitudes and absolute refusal to concede that this might be about more than her, has precluded the leadership from really commenting at all on the many other stories which have been further illuminated, an intolerable state of affairs. I would personally have difficulty campaigning for Labour if this situation continues.

All of this remains at the level of allegations, for sure, but it seems unlikely that an investigation would not do damage to the Labour Party. But this is equally true for the Liberal Democrats because of Cyril Smith, and very much so for the Conservative Party, with a serious of prominent figures also having been mooted as Elm Guest House visitors (one of them still in the House of Commons today), not to mention the as yet far-from-clarified situation involving the late Peter Morrison, about whom I have blogged at length, involving allegations (based upon accounts by Conservative politicians) of cover-up and even bribery, and that Morrison was linked to the North Wales abuse scandals.

I am a member of the Labour Party; I was unable to stay supporting them following the Iraq War, but rejoined after Tony Blair left the leadership and have had high hopes of Ed Miliband, who I voted for as leader. I look to the Labour Party to protect the interests of ordinary citizens against powerful forms of exploitation, and can hardly imagine an issue Labour should be opposing and attacking more strongly than the existence of networks of VIPs using their position to exploit and abuse children sexually, protected through friends in high places. Miliband showed great resolve over the issue of Murdoch and hacking; now he needs to do the same of the issue of organised and institutional abuse. His silence (and that of most other senior Labour politicians) to date on the issue, save to defend Harman as mentioned earlier, is no response befitting of a Prime-Minister- and government-in-waiting; as with other party leaders, the impression given is of one more concerned about protecting the reputation of a few of his colleagues than in investigating extremely serious allegations of abuse (just as has been seen in numerous other institutions facing abuse or cover-up allegations relating to some of their members).

This should not be a partisan issue, and attempts by all sides to exploit it for party political advantage are crass in the extreme. Ed Miliband has the opportunity to change this and call for an all-purpose public inquiry with which he and his party will fully co-operate, which would put real pressure on the other parties to do the same, as he should also demand. This would require a similar level of commitment from his senior colleagues; if some are not prepared to give this commitment, then Miliband must make clear that he is no longer in a position to lend them support.

[*As for example in the case of the American feminist Kate Millett, who when asked in an interview (originally published in Loving Boys (New York: Semiotext(e), 1980), pp. 80-83) ‘Do you think that a tender loving erotic relationship can exist between a boy and a man?’ she replied ‘Of course, or between a female child and an older woman’ and also said that ‘ part of a free society would be that you could choose whomever you fancied, and children should be able to freely choose as well’. Millett’s book Sexual Politics (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969) remains a standard feminist text, but I believe on the basis of this interview anything she says about sexual politics should be considered suspect. ]

But another name appeared in the December article, which has not really been investigated further prior to this article: that of boys’ choir conductor and teacher Alan Doggett (1936-1978), who had an extended and important relationship with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. A letter about the suicide of Doggett in 1978 appeared in Issue 10 of Magpie (Letters, Magpie, Issue No. 10 (no date), p. 4) and a notice of his memorial service in the subsequent issue (‘Alan Doggett – Memorial Service’, Magpie, Issue No. 11 (May 1978), p. 2 – both this and the letter can be read in the fourth of my PIE blog posts linked to above), to both of which I will return presently. The Mail article named Doggett as a member of PIE; a source close to the heart of current police investigations has confirmed to me that this was definitely the case.

Doggett is listed in the second Magpie article as having worked as conductor of the London Boys’ Choir (erroneously titled here – this was the London Boy Singers), and was to be remembered for his ‘friendliness, integrity and loyalty’. But his claim to fame is stronger than this; as has been chronicled in various books and articles about or by Lloyd Webber and Rice, he was responsible for commissioning and conducting Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, conducting the recording of Jesus Christ Superstar, and sharing the conducting for Evita, as well as writing his own musical, Jason and the Golden Fleece, inspired by these earlier examples. A scholarly article argues for Doggett’s close involvement with Lloyd Webber and Rice, saying that ‘he was effectively a third member of the team prior to the international success of Jesus Christ Superstar’ (David Chandler, ‘’Everyone should have the opportunity’: Alan Doggett and the modern British Music’, Studies in Musical Theatre, Vol. 6, No. 3 (2012), pp. 275-289 (quotation from p. 275) – this article mentions nothing about the more troubling aspects of Doggett’s life, other than mentioning in passing that he committed suicide), whilst Andrew Lloyd Webber paid fulsome tribute to Doggett in an article published in the Mail in 2012 (‘’I owe my success to an abseiling vicar’ says Andrew Lloyd Webber as he opens up about the highs and lows of his career’, Daily Mail, September 24th, 2012).

In this article, I give an overview of Doggett’s life and work, and appeal to those who may have known or worked with him in (especially those who studied at Westminster Under School, Colet Court School, or who sung in the London Boy Singers or in the larger massed boy choirs he assembled) to come forward if they have any relevant information.

Alan Doggett was born on November 29th, 1936, in Epsom, Surrey. His father was Kenneth Raymond Doggett, who edited the shipping journal Dock and Harbour Authority. Alan grew up in Iver, Buckinghamshire, where he took piano lessons from an early age, and attended Colet Court, before going on to read history at Selwyn College, Cambridge (Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, p. 277 – all other information not sourced elsewhere comes from here. Some of Chandler’s information on Doggett’s early life comes from correspondence with Doggett’s sister Jennifer Acornley, Ian Hunter, Doggett’s successor at Colet Court, and Julian Lloyd Webber). One account describes him as ‘a discreet homosexual’ who ‘ was enthusiastic about music but only modestly gifted’ (Michael Walsh, Andrew Lloyd Webber: His Life and Works (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1989), p. 37). His first job was as a history teacher at Westminster Under School, where he doubled as a music teacher and led the school choir (ibid). In this capacity he taught the young Julian Lloyd Webber (b. 1951), who attended the school between 1961 and 1963 and was a member of the choir (Tim Rice, Oh, What a Circus: The Autobiography (Coronet Books, 1999), p. 131). Through Julian, Alan Doggett came to meet his father William Lloyd Webber, and began to take an interest in the compositions of Julian’s brother Andrew Lloyd Webber (b. 1948), helping him with notational matters (Walsh, Lloyd Webber, p. 37). At some point during this period, Doggett also served as a vicar-choral at St Paul’s Cathedral, alongside Ian Hunter, who would become his assistant at Colet Court and later his successor (Jonathan Mantle, Fanfare: The Unauthorised Biography of Andrew Lloyd Webber (M. Joseph, 1989), pp. 30, 41).

At Colet Court, Doggett he brought in a system of vocal training based upon that of the Vienna Boys’ Choir (most distinct from traditional English methods), as well as finding external performance opportunities for the choir (Gerald McKnight, Andrew Lloyd Webber (London, Toronto, Sydney & New York: Granada Publishing, 1984), p. 85; Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, p. 277). He also worked as organist at the school, at least by December 1964 (At least by December 1964. See advert in The Musical Times, Vol. 105, No. 1462 (December 1964), p. 936. Doggett had a letter published in The Musical Times in August 1966, entitled ‘Let the Children Sing’, just talking about the nature of school choirs; he was then listed as belonging to St Paul’s Junior School (the same thing as Colet Court). See The Musical Times, Vol. 107, No. 1482 (August 1966), pp. 687-688).

In 1964, Doggett also set up a choir at Emmanuel Parish Church, West Hampstead; his address at the time was given as SW1 2580 (see advert in The Musical Times, Vol. 105, No. 1451 (Jan 1964), p. 64). The vicar at the church during this period was The Reverend Jack Dover Wellman (The Rev Dr Peter Galloway, ‘A short history and guide to Emmanuel Church West Hampstead’) , who appears to have been an eccentric figure who wrote two books entitled A Priest’s Psychic Diary, with introduction by Richard Baker (London: SPCK, 1977) and A Priest and the Paranormal (Worthing: Churchman, 1988). Wellman also appeared on an edition of the late night Channel 4 programme After Dark, on April 30th, 1988, to discuss the subject ‘Bewitched, Bothered, or Bewildered?’, chaired by Anthony Wilson (see ‘After Dark 2’).

In 1965, Doggett already became more closely associated with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, helping out with some of the demonstration recordings of their musical The Likes of Us, written that year, about the life of Thomas Barnardo. Already on these recordings the Colet Court choir featured as the homeless children who Barnardo was helping, in stage cockney accents (Rice, Oh, What a Circus, p. 131; Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, p. 277, Mantle, Fanfare, p. 30). Rice described him as an ‘extremely camp teacher, who was some ten years older than I was’, and ‘a talented music master, though a less talented composer, always on the lookout for a new way of instilling enthusiasm for music into his young charges (aged eight to thirteen)’ (ibid).

But at some point whilst working at Colet Court, Doggett began to systematically abuse young boys there; since the appearance of the first version of this article, and the important subsequent articles by Andrew Norfolk in The Times (Andrew Norfolk, ‘Teachers ‘abused boys at Osborne’s old school”, ”The teacher sat us on his lap until his face went very red”, and ‘Friends to stars had easy access to boys’, all The Times, March 25th, 2014; Norfolk, ‘Boys punished for telling of abuse by teacher’, The Times, March 28th, 2014), numerous former pupils have come forward to testify about their abuse at the hands of Doggett (and other teachers at Colet Court and St Paul’s). One pupil, ‘Luke Redmond’ (not his real name), was sexually assaulted by three different men at Colet Court by the time he reached the age of 12. These were Doggett, the dorm monitor Paul Topham, who went on to become an Anglican priest, and was questioned under caution by police in 2000, though no charges were brought before his death in 2012, and a housemaster known as ‘Alex’ Alexander, who took pleasure in punishing boys in a sexualised fashion before taking them on his lap and giving them sweets and physical affection. On Doggett, the final printed version of the article says the following (not all included in the link above):

Luke’s abuse by Alan Doggett, Colet Court’s director of music, was a once-only indecent assault during the boy’s compulsory audition for the choir. [From earlier version of article: Doggett’s auditions of boarders were always when pupils were dressed for bed. Luke stood by the piano. As he sang, Doggett’s hand explored beneath the waistband of his pyjamas.]

A far worse fate awaited another boy in his dormitory, a year younger than Luke, who was angelic in both voice and looks. He was Doggett’s chosen one, summoned far too often from their dormitory to spend long hours at night in the choirmaster’s bedroom. (Norfolk, ”The teacher sat us on his lap until his face went very red”).

Another account by ‘Stephen’, one of the boys who eventually reported Doggett, leading to the latter’s leaving the school, spoke of what amounts to child prostitution, which boys receiving money from Doggett for allowing him to sexually abuse them:

“He had one particular favourite who received regular visits in the dormitory at night. He’d abuse the poor boy without seeming to care that we could all see and watch what was happening.”

Other ex-pupils spoke this week of open gossip among the boys that “half a crown” was the “going rate for a session with Doggett”. One said that his year group even coined a new verb: to be “Doggoed” was to be groped and fondled. (Norfolk, ‘Boys punished for telling of abuse by teacher’)

In late 1967, Doggett contacted Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, to request a cantata for the school’s annual spring concert. The headmaster of Colet Court, Henry Collis, had been quickly won over by Doggett’s proposal, despite some conservative doubts about setting a biblical story to popular music (McKnight, Lloyd Webber, pp. 85-86). To Lloyd Webber and Rice, Doggett made clear that he wanted something short and sharp, ideally a cantata on a religious theme, a story through song, though giving them carte blanche over the subject matter (Michael Coveney, The Andrew Lloyd Webber Story (London: Arrow Books, 2000), p. 53; Rice, Oh, What a Circus, p. 131; Mantle, Fanfare, pp. 41-42). Doggett nonetheless suggested a biblical subject, thinking of what Michael Coveney refers to as that sort of unbuttoned Christian sing-along represented by such pieces as Herbert Chappell’s The Daniel Jazz (which he had produced the year before), Michael Flanders and Joseph Horovitz’s Captain Noah and His Floating Zoo and indeed Benjamin Britten’s exemplary Noye’s Fludde (Coveney, The Lloyd Webber Story, p. 53). Rice found the story of Jacob’s son, Joseph, who was landed in trouble by his dreams and coat of many colours, leading his brothers to sell him into slavery in Egypt, where he becomes a prophetic guru to the Pharaoh, in The Wonder Book of Bible Stories (ibid; Rice, Oh, What a Circus, p. 132). This would become Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. Lloyd Webber and Doggett worked together at the music room of Colet Court whilst the work was being composed, and Lloyd Webber was prepared to accept suggestions from the choir (Mantle, Fanfare, p. 42; Rice, Oh, What a Circus, pp. 133, 135).

The world premiere of Joseph took place on Friday March 1st, 1968, at 2:30 pm, in the Assembly Hall of Colet Court, conducted by Doggett himself, an ad hoc pop group called The Mixed Bag, including Rice (who took the part of Elvis/Pharaoh) and singer David Daltrey, a cousin of Roger’s (from The Who), who led the principal solo numbers for Joseph himself (see Rice, Oh, What a Circus, pp. 136-142, for a detailed account; also McKnight, Lloyd Webber, pp. 87-88, for Ian Hunter’s account). The school was itself about to move from its 1890 premises in Hammersmith to new buildings across the river in Barnes, and this performance would be the last in the old Assembly Hall (Walsh, Lloyd Webber, p. 37). The first half of the concert consisted of performances by the pianist John Lill, and both Julian and William Lloyd Webber; for Joseph, Ian Hunter played the piano and Julian played the cello (Stephen Citron, Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber: The New Musical (London: Chatto & Windus, 2001), p. 117). Several hundred parents were present and clapped politely (Walsh, Lloyd Webber, p. 37), but also on that day, a representative of the music publisher Novello’s, who had been invited to the premiere by Doggett and had given it an advance listing in what was then their flagship periodical, The Musical Times (Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, pp. 279-280 – Chandler is sceptical about the account offered later in Rice, Oh, What a Circus, p. 148), offered to take on the piece, and pay £100 for it, as an educational work for schools (Lloyd Webber, ‘I owe my success to an abseiling vicar’).

The next performance took place at Westminster Central Hall, on May 12th, 1968, and involved 300 boys from Colet Court, conducted by Doggett (advert in The Musical Times, Vol. 109, No. 1503 (May 1968) p. 464. It had been organised by William Lloyd Webber, who was organist and musical director at Central Hall, and who played the organ in the performance (Hunter played the harpsichord) (Mantle, Fanfare, p. 45). The first half of the concert, attended by around two thousand people, including many parents, consisted of performances by the pianist John Lill, and both Julian and William (Citron, Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, p. 117; Lloyd Webber, ‘I owe my success to an abseiling vicar’). One boy in the choir was Nicholas Jewell, who had persuaded his father Derek Jewell, pop critic for the Sunday Times, to attend the performance (McKnight, Lloyd Webber, pp. 88-89). Jewell published an extremely positive review, which recognised the importance of Doggett’s role, the following weekend in the Sunday Times, on May 19th, 1968 (see Mantle, Fanfare, pp. 46-47, for the review; see also McKnight, Lloyd Webber, pp. 91-93, Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, p. 282), which caused jubilation amongst all involved with the production.

Eight weeks later, a recording was being made for Decca at the studios at Abbey Road of an expanded version for augmented ensemble with solo voices (a cast consisting of Terry Saunders, David Daltrey, Malcolm Parry, Tim Rice, John Cook, Bryan Watson) and rock musicians. The twelve or so Colet Court choirboys served as a backing group, with Doggett conducting and a ‘Joseph Consortium’ with William Lloyd Webber helping out on organ, and Martin Wilcox on harpsichord; some vocal backing was provided by Andrew and Tim Rice (Mantle, Fanfare, p. 47; Citron, Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, p. 148; the recording was Scepter/Capital (S) SMAS 93738. See Jerry Osborne, Movie/TV Soundtracks and Original Cast Recordings Price and Reference Guide (Jerry Osborne: Jerry Osborne Enterprises, 2002), p. 1982; see Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, pp. 281-282 for Rice and other’s attempts to marginalise the importance of Doggett and Novello’s in this process). Jonathan Mantle points out that ‘Half the boys of Colet Court were bussed over to sit at the sides of the grand Victorian hall and make up the choruses’ (Mantle, Fanfare, p. 45), but it is not clear whether these amounted to the twelve singers he mentions, or constituted others as well. Whichever, a large percentage of boys at Colet Court in 1968 would have been involved in this performance. A further performance was given in St Paul’s Cathedral on November 9th, 1968, again with Doggett conducting, William Lloyd Webber on organ, and received a positive review by Ray Connolly in the Evening Standard (Mantle, Fanfare, p. 51; McKnight, Lloyd Webber, pp. 98-99).

But at some point between the Westminster performance in May 1968 and the recording in November 1968, Doggett left Colet Court; the exact date is unclear. The following accounts have been provided by former pupils:

Stephen (his surname is withheld), the pupil who ended Doggett’s Colet Court career, said that he and a friend decided to speak to the school’s headmaster, Henry Collis, after Doggett indecently assaulted both 11-year-olds as they sat on each side of him during a televised football match in May 1968.

“It was the Manchester United v Benfica European Cup Final. We were sitting on the floor and Doggett’s hands were groping inside our pyjama bottoms.

“He wouldn’t leave us alone. He’d already had a go at me in the dormitory on quite a few occasions,” Stephen said. After the match, the two pupils decided that “he’s got to be stopped”. They informed Mr Collis, who was headmaster of Colet Court from 1957 to 1973 and served as chairman of the Independent Preparatory Schools Association.

Stephen said: “When I next went home on exeat that weekend, the school had telephoned my father to complain that I’d made up terrible stories about Doggett. Dad asked me what had been going on. When I told him, he said he believed me and I’d done the right thing in speaking out, but when I got back to the school the two of us were summoned to Mr Collis’s study.

“I can still see us standing in front of his desk on the Monday morning.He was furious. He said we were wicked for making up such awful lies. Mr Doggett was so appalled and embarrassed by the disgraceful things we’d said that he’d decided to leave the school. We should be thoroughly ashamed of ourselves. He gave us detention.”

Stephen said that another boy in their year suffered far worse crimes at Doggett’s hands: (Norfolk, ‘Boys punished for telling of abuse by teacher’)

The Manchester United/Benfica match in question was the 1968 European Cup Final, at Wembley Stadium, which took place on May 29th, 1968, thus just two-and-a-half weeks after the second performance of Joseph in Westminster Central Hall. This is consistent with Gerald McKnight’s assertion that ‘Doggett’s remarkable vision was barely completed when he left the school’ (McKnight, Lloyd Webber, p. 86).

Other accounts differ as to the reasons of veracity thereof of his departure; Michael Walsh writes of his having ‘been let go at Colet Court, with rumors of his homosexual predilections swirling about him’ (Walsh, Lloyd Webber, p. 67), whilst Stephen Citron claims Doggett was ‘let go at Colet Court because he had sexually molested one of the choirboys’, causing his career to go into a tailspin (Citron, Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, p. 151 n. 5); whereas Mantle just says that Doggett ‘left his job at Colet Court’, though later that ‘he had left his post with the choir of Colet Court, but he had been unable to leave them alone’, leaving little doubt who ‘them’ were (Mantle, Fanfare, pp. 91, 130). The account by ‘Stephen’ suggests that Doggett left of his own volition, though it is very possible that some pressure was brought upon him to take this decision. Tim Rice writes in his biography, looking back at this incident from the vantage point of Doggett’s suicide in 1978, that:

The only previous time in ten years that Andrew and I had come across such rumours concerning Alan, the allegations were proven to be exactly that, as the time and place of the supposed transgression clashed precisely with a recording date at which all three of us were continually present. It has been known for young boys, and more commonly their parents, to manufacture or exaggerate incidents when they know and (understandably) disapprove of a teacher’s inclinations. (Rice, Oh, What a Circus, p. 401)

However, Rice did not discount the possibility that the allegations which would surface ten years later were true, making clear that he was not claiming ‘that Alan was squeaky clean throughout his musical dealings with his singers’ (ibid). His successor in the position was his former assistant at the school, Ian Hunter (ibid), who would go on to present Joseph again various times at the school (McKnight, Lloyd Webber, pp. 99-100); Hunter would also go on to become Deputy Headmaster of Colet Court at some time around 1973-74 (my thanks to another former Colet Court pupil for confirming this to me).

Rice’s inclination not to believe the 1968 allegations needs to be revisited (and perhaps his autobiography rewritten) in light of the latest information. Furthermore, there are questions to be asked about what Hunter and others knew about Doggett’s activities at the school, which could hardly have been very secret if carried out with many boys and in open view of others.

Doggett’s subsequent teaching positions after leaving Colet Court have become clearer due to information supplied by various people since the initial version of this article. Michael Walsh and Michael Coveney both mention Doggett’s teaching at the City of London School at the time when Lloyd Webber and Rice wrote their short-lived musical Come Back Richard in November 1969 (from which just one title single was released by RCA that month), which Doggett conducted at the school (Walsh, Lloyd Webber, p. 59; Coveney, The Lloyd Webber Story, p. 58; see also John Snelson, Andrew Lloyd Webber, with foreword by Geoffrey Block (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 222 n. 9), but Chandler claims that his only connection was through being invited to adjudicate the school’s Junior Music Competition in 1969 (Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, p. 282, n. 4). Walsh also writes that Doggett ‘had caught on at another London school and then abruptly left to lead a choir called the London Boy Singers [see below]’ (Walsh, Lloyd Webber, p. 67), but without clarifying if he is again referring to the City of London School here.

Since the first appearance of this blog article and the subsequent articles on Doggett in The Times, two individuals have come forward to confirm that Doggett did indeed work at City of London School on a more permanent basis after leaving Colet Court (thus contradicting the account given in Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, p. 282 n. 4, based upon information provided to him by Terry Heard, archivist at City of London School), teaching rowing as well as music (the latter probably only at the junior school).

Furthermore, one woman has contacted me to confirm that Doggett was also Head music teacher at St Mary’s School for Girls in Wiltshire Lane, Norwood, Middlesex (now part of Haydon School) in West London for several years in the 1970s (approximately 1972-75). In 1974, both Lloyd Webber and Rice came to give a talk and share their experiences (see comment from ‘louise’ here). This visit is also confirmed by a comment by Geraldine Maidment (née Stanley) on Friends Reunited boards. Doggett was the first male teacher allowed to teach at St. Mary’s, a school with around 600 girls (it is possible he had been excluded from teaching boys, but not girls, though this at present is just speculation); the girls apparently gave him something of a difficult time, but he gladly allowed them to bring pop records to class and regularly sing numbers from Joseph.

Furthermore, a comment posted below this by Tim Waygood indicates that Doggett taught music at Culford School for just around two terms in 1976-77, where he was resident teacher at Cadogan House, one of three live-in teachers . Waygood recalls Doggett taking boys to his room and beating their bare backsides, and describes him as a ‘terrifying man with a penchant for punishing boys’. In one case, he beat an 11-year old so badly with a hairbrush that he bled; Doggett left the school under hushed circumstances soon afterwards. Waygood was 12 when he heard he had killed himself. Apparently every boy knew how dodgy Doggett was, and there were suspicions about other teachers at the school.

Doggett also taught from August 26th to September 2nd 1969 at one of the Adult Summer Schools with concurrent Choirboys’ Courses for the Royal School of Church Music; this took place at Dean Close School, Cheltenham; fellow teachers included Geoffrey Barber, Michael English, Allen Ferns, Geoffrey Fletcher, W. J. Goodey, Richard Greening. (The Musical Times, Vol. 110, No. 1516 (June 1969), p. 561).

Doggett’s evangelism for popular music with religious themes was undiminished after his departure from Colet Court, and he published an article to that effect in 1969 (Doggett, ‘Pop here, my Lord?’, English Church Music 1969, pp. 37-40, cited in Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, p. 278). Feeling a great pride in Joseph, Doggett advertised for ‘recruits’ in spring 1969 for a ‘mammoth school performance’ of the work, to be held in St. Paul’s, but it appears that this never took place (Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, p. 284; this includes a reproduction of the advert).

Doggett continued to make recordings with Lloyd Webber and Rice following that of Joseph; dates here are unclear, so that it is also unclear whether what Rice refers to as ‘Alan Doggett’s boy choir’, which he dubbed ‘the Wonderschool’, was the Colet Court choir or the London Boy Singers. Recordings were made of ‘Bike’, a Syd Barrett number which had appeared on the first Pink Floyd album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), and also of the Everly Brothers’ ‘Problems’, as well as some songs with the Mixed Bag and David Daltrey, but none of these were ever released by Decca. One which was a single featuring a solo choirboy who worked with Doggett; at present I am unclear as to the title of this song, but the B-side was a version of ‘Any Dream Will Do’, with changed lyrics, recorded in 1969 (Rice, Oh, What a Circus, p. 166).

Around Christmas of 1969, Doggett had heard what would become the theme tune for Jesus Christ Superstar, and suggested to Lloyd Webber and Rice that they might use this for a musical based upon the Daily Mail Air Race; the composers decided instead upon the theme of Christ on the cross (McKnight, Lloyd Webber, p. 109). The recording of the new work (an album which preceded stage performances) was made in 1970. Doggett once again conducted the orchestra and a children’s choir (who are unidentified on the recording), together with singers Murray Head, Ian Gillan, Yvonne Elliman, Victor Brox, Brian Keith, Johnny Gustafson, Barry Dennen and Mike D’Abo, some of whom recorded their contributions after the orchestra and choir had finished in the studio. The part of the priest was played by Paul Raven, then the name of Gary Glitter, who of course was later convicted of multiple child sexual abuse and pornography charges. The orchestra featured strings from Malcolm Henderson’s City of London Ensemble, with Alan O’Duffy as engineer (Walsh, Lloyd Webber, p. 67; Rice, Oh, What a Circus, pp. 198-199). Doggett also conducted Lloyd Webber’s first film score in 1971, for Stephen Frears’ film Gumshoe (Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, p. 283).

But Lloyd Webber and Rice noticed that Doggett’s conducting was not really up to professional standards, and he seemed out of his depth with the more hard-rock sections of the Superstar recording, and so he was replaced first by Ian Hunter, then for the 1973 film version by André Previn (Walsh, Lloyd Webber, p. 67; Citron, Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, p. 151 n. 5; Mantle, Fanfare, p. 91).

This would not however signify the end of Doggett’s collaborations with Lloyd Webber and Rice; there was a new surge of interest in Joseph at late 1972, for which Doggett was brought back to act as musical director for a production at the Edinburgh Festival, directed by Frank Dunlop, together with some medieval mystery plays. With some changes to the lyrics, the performance of Joseph was nonetheless relatively faithful to the original Doggett production (Rice, Oh, What a Circus, p. 286). This production was then taken to the Roundhouse in London and to the Albery Theatre in the West End, and also televised and broadcast on the ITV network on December 24th, 1972, then again on December 23rd, 1973. The Albery performance was paired with a new Lloyd-Webber and Rice work, Jacob’s Journey, thus yet another premiere for Doggett (Mantle, Fanfare, pp. 95-96; Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, p. 285).

In 1970, Doggett became Director of the St Barnabas Singers (in Holland Park), who met on the first Sunday of each month. An advert for the choir indicated that the term’s programme would begin on October 4, including new setting of canticles written for the choir by Betty Roe. The address given was 23 Addison Road, W14. (The Musical Times, Vol. 111, No. 1532 (October 1970), p. 1050). He also served as organist at St Barnabas Anglican and Methodist Chuch, from some point around this time; the vicar of this church at the time of his death in 1978 was the Rev. Pat Kirwin (‘Sex case choirmaster killed on railway line’, Evening News, February 8th, 1978).

Then, by December 1971 at the latest, Doggett was working for the London Boy Singers (LBS) (sometimes mistakenly referred to as as the London Boys’ Choir). This was a group founded first in 1961 in order to supply a concert boys’ choir in England, and through the enthusiasm of Benjamin Britten, who served as President. It was initially known as the Finchley Boys’ Choir, formed from the Finchley Children’s Music Group. At first the LBS was run by a Board of Governors, with Eric Walter White as chairman; during this time they performed the premieres of Britten’s King Herod and the Cock and the Twelve Apostles, both dedicated to the choir, in June 1962 in Aldeburgh. The first artistic director was John Andrewes, followed by Jonathan Steele, who was conductor from the outset. However, Steele, broke with Britten and the Governors in 1966. The choir would continue through into the 1970s, and an archive is maintained by the London Boy Singers Association (see ‘London Boy Singers Association’ for more details).

According to one account written after Doggett’s death by a writer who appeared to know Doggett and his work well, Doggett became director of the LBS as early as 1964 (Colin Ward, ‘The saving grace of worldliness’, New Society, July 9th, 1981, p. 72). This is certainly not the account given by the official pages listed above, nor does it concur with the page of archived concert programme of the Finchley Children’s Music Group, which does not mention Doggett once (but mentions Steele twice). A major concert in March 1970 was conducted by Steele (Ronald Crichton, ‘London Boys Singers. St Anne’s and St. Agnes’, Financial Times, March 23rd, 1970, p. 3).I have found no evidence of an earlier involvement of Doggett’s with the choir, so conclude that his work with them probably post-dated Britten’s involvement with them. In December 1971, he was working together with David Rose, and both of their names were given for audition forms (see The Musical Times, Vol. 112, No. 1546 (December 1971), p. 1226). Tim Rice inaccurately refers to the LBS as having been ‘the choir he [Doggett] had formed since leaving regular school employment’ (Rice, Oh, What a Circus, pp. 351-352), but it had a longer history than that. In 1973, Doggett who had at some point earlier become Associate Director, was appointed Director of the LBS in succession to Steele (Musical Opinion, Vol. 97 (1973), p. 428). In this capacity, one commentator argues that he brought the choir to international fame (Citron, Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, p. 151 n. 5). By 1975, a Paul Terry was writing to the Daily Mirror in gushing terms about the LBS, pointing out that they ‘have sung more than 210 part-songs in their concerts over the past six years – all from memory and in nine languages, including Russian, Hebrew and Welsh!’, their average age was 13½, and they were ‘just ordinary lads from schools all over London who love singing’, who had performed in as different locations as the West Country and Rome (where they had been the previous Easter, this was probably a trip to the Vatican referred to in a later article) and elsewhere in Europe (Letter from Paul Terry, Caithness Road, London, ‘Songsters’, Daily Mirror, August 26th, 1975, p. 16; Anthony Holden, ‘Tragic end for the music man’, The Sunday Times, February 19th, 1978).

Amongst the concerts of which there is documentary record of his conducting with the choir are one with Timothy Bond on the organ, at St. Vedast, Foster Lane, EC2, on July 11th, 1974 (The Times, June 6th, 1974, p. 7), one at the Exmouth Pavilion on August 3rd, 1975 (The Musical Times, Vol. 116, No. 1590 (Aug., 1975), p. 732), and one at St. Edmundsbury Cathedral on July 30th 1976 (The Musical Times, Vol. 117, No. 1598 (April 1976), p. 295).

Doggett also conducted a recording of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, with the City of London Ensemble, and Frankie Howerd as narrator, Polydor Carnival 2928 201 (1-25), which was reviewed in an issue of Gramophone from 1972 (p. 110). This version had been prepared by Rice, and Rice and Lloyd Webber were credited as producers on the recording (Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, p. 283). This was not the only art music he conducted during these years; he would also conduct the UK premiere of Schoenberg’s Sonata Fragment (1941) in 1974 (Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, p. 276, n. 1).

Doggett turned to trying to create a cantata/musical of his own along the lines of those of Lloyd Webber and Rice (perhaps, as Chandler suggests (‘Alan Doggett’, p. 284) as a way of realising his vision of a ‘mammoth school performance’ of Joseph); this would be Jason and the Golden Fleece, for which he wrote the music, and co-wrote the lyrics with the Hampstead poet Rita Ford (1931-1985); it was described as ‘A New Musical for Schools’ (Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, pp. 285-286). The work received its first concert performance at St Barnabas Church, Addison Road, London W14 (where he worked with the St Barnabas Singers mentioned above) on Wednesday June 27th, 1973, hosted by City of London Productions (Advert in The Musical Times, Vol. 114, No. 1564 (June 1973), p. 589). A choir of 250 children were involved, a combination of the LBS, the Islington Green school choir, and also a selection of ‘largely untrained children’ from St. Barnabas and St Philip’s schools, and St Peter’s school in Hammersmith (Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, p. 286). The familial resemblances of this work to Joseph, not least in terms of both works’ use of a narrator, have been commented upon by various people, though also its weaknesses compared to the work of Lloyd Webber and Rice, both by critics at the time and later writers (see Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, pp. 285-287; Chandler is concerned to defend this work against the idea it might simply be a poor man’s Joseph). At the outset it received positive reviews from Hilary Finch and Barbara Denny, reviewing for the South Kensington News and Chelsea Post and Kensington News and Post (cited in Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, p. 285).

The work would receive a further performance in a revised version on March 9th, 1977 at Westminster Central Hall, with large forces drawn from many London schools (Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, p. 287). This performance, however, received a markedly downbeat review from Merion Bowen, who wrote that the work ‘was not at all edifying’ and that Doggett’s music displays little of the flair shown by Andrew Lloyd Webber and others in the same vein, and Ford’s lyrics aren’t exactly inspired’ (Merion Bowen, ‘Jason and the Golden Fleece’, The Guardian, March 10th, 1977).

Despite having been replaced for the film version of Superstar, Doggett was involved in part in the conducting duties for Lloyd Webber’s score for the 1974 film of The Odessa File (Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, p. 283). Also, at some time in the mid-1970s, whilst Lloyd Webber and Rice were working on Evita, Rice also wrote some lyrics for a children’s album, Barbapapa, which was a spin-off from a Dutch TV series, and included Ed Stewart on the recording; Rice brought in Doggett and the LBS for the sessions (Rice, Oh, What a Circus, p. 325).

When it came to the recording of Evita in 1976 (the first production would not come until two years later, after Doggett’s death), Doggett was credited as ‘Children’s Choirmaster, Musical Coordinator (names of all the main performers can be found here); the main conductor and choir director was Anthony Bowles. Rice would later write that Doggett ‘was gently relegated to directing the London Boy Singers’ (Rice, Oh, What a Circus, pp. 351-352), though he appears to have been quite happy in his allotted role (Mantle, Fanfare, p. 116).

The end came for Doggett in early 1978. As with his leaving Colet Court, accounts differ of the actual events. Michael Walsh writes that ‘When one of the boys [of the LBS] accused Doggett of molestation – apparently the accusation was false – the conductor was arrested and, as a condition of his bail, was forbidden to have any contact with his chorus’ (Walsh, Lloyd Webber, p. 67). Stephen Citron, who as mentioned earlier reports the molestation at Colet Court as an established fact, says that on this occasion Doggett was again ‘accused of molestation – this time presumably falsely – he was forbidden to have any contact with his chorus’ (Citron, Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, p. 151 n. 5). Michael Coveney writes that Doggett ‘was still teaching and running his boys’ choirs but he was threatened with allegations about his private life and preferred not to risk public disgrace’ and that:

The tragedy is that it later emerged there was nothing on the files that was ever going to make any kind of case against him in court. Lloyd Webber remains convinced that Doggett would never have been guilty of taking advantage of any young person in his charge: ‘His main talent was in helping children to make music. He was convinced that every young person had music in him or her, and that it was never too late to stop learning. (Coveney, The Lloyd Webber Story, p. 112).

All three such writers assume either that Doggett was innocent or that the case against him would not stand up in court; Mantle on the other hand writes about ‘forbidden love’ which ‘took other, sadder forms’ and reports the ‘allegation of indecency’ right after arguing that ‘he [Doggett] had been unable to leave them alone [after leaving his post at Colet Court]’, presumably a reference to a proclivity for boys (Mantle, Fanfare, pp. 130-131). McKnight does not even seem to have registered the event, claiming that Doggett died in 1973 (McKnight, Lloyd Webber, p. 99), whereas Rice hedges from committing himself to a view of Doggett’s guilt or innocence in 1978 (unlike in 1968) (see below). Another book on Lloyd Webber by John Snelson (Snelson, Lloyd Webber) only mentions Doggett once in passing in the main text, and briefly in two endnotes, so does not consider his death at all. But in most cases the defence or denial seems beset by doubt on the parts of the authors, suggesting their verdicts may reflect what they wish to have been the case rather than necessarily what did transpire.

Doggett was due to conduct a further performance of Jason and the Golden Fleece at the Royal Albert Hall on February 23rd 1978, with a choir of a thousand singers, entitled ‘The London Boy Singers And a Massed Choir of 1000’ who he had selected and coached, as well as many other children playing recorders and percussion, all from around 34 different schools; the performance was to be on behalf of Help the Aged. A few adult celebrities were also involved, including Ed Stewart, Ian Lavender, and Barney the Clown (‘Concert’s lost conductor’, The Guardian, 24/2/78; Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, p. 287). An article from three years after his death (to which I will return below) mentioned that according to some press reports, police had intended to interview every one of these thousand boys (Ward, ‘The saving grace of worldliness’, p. 72).

What is clear is that, following an investigation by detectives in Hammersmith, Doggett was charged on February 8th, 1978 in West London Magistrate’s Court and remanded on bail of £1000 (on condition that he made no contact with any member of the choir or their parents), hours after which, in a depressed state, he travelled back to his birthplace of Iver, and lay down on a railroad track so as to be run over by a train (Walsh, Lloyd Webber, p. 67; Citron, Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, p. 151 n. 5; ‘Sex case choirmaster killed on railway line’, Evening News, February 8th, 1978; ‘Sex-case death’, Daily Mirror, February 9th, 1978, p. 3; ‘Sex case man killed’, Daily Mail, February 9th, 1978, p. 9; ‘Concert’s lost conductor’, The Guardian, February 24th, 1978). Immediately after Doggett’s death, one unnamed friend was quoted as saying that he did not think Doggett ‘could face the shame of having the whole issue dragged through the courts’, whilst the Rev Kirwin, vicar at St Barnabas, described Doggett as ‘a friend for ten years’ who ‘was one of the kindest and most helpful persons I have known’ (‘Sex case choirmaster killed on railway line’)

Doggett had sent handwritten suicide notes to a few friends (one article claims there were four, including one to his father, one to an unnamed clergyman, one to Salisbury – ‘Sex case choirmaster killed on railway line’, Evening News, February 8th, 1978; another that there were two, to his sister and a clergyman – ‘Concert’s lost conductor’, The Guardian, February 24th, 1978), which were delivered a few days later (Walsh, Lloyd Webber, p. 67). One of these was to Rice, who received two envelopes, dated a week apart, upon returning from a trip to Australia, both from Doggett. The first was a plea for an opportunity to earn some royalties from work he continued to do with his boys’ choirs on Joseph; the second was the suicide note. Rice quotes part of it in his autobiography, and other sections were quoted in an article published eleven days after Doggett’s death:

I am sorry if any of you have been hurt or will be hurt by the events of the past few days. Do not grieve, do not feel remorse, do not feel ‘We should have done more’. (Anthony Holden, ‘Tragic end for the music man’, The Sunday Times, February 19th, 1978).

We all have to sail our own ship through life and this ship has capsized. No one could have helped, it was my destiny. Pray for me, my parents, family and friends. The way I have chosen, the way of the Greeks, though hard, is best. I am sorry I have not completely lived up to it. (Rice, Oh, What a Circus, p. 400; section from ‘We all..’ to ‘…my destiny’, in Holden, ‘Tragic end’, above).

But remember me, please, for the good things, the happy times. The meals, the drink, the conversation, the good companionship. Remember the best bits in my character; there were, i hope, more pluses than minuses in the mixture. (Holden, ‘Tragic end’).

Rice, writing about the ‘Allegations of impropriety with young boys’ which ‘had apparently surfaced (not for the first time)’, whereupon ‘Alan had been arrested and charged’, leading to his suicide (ibid), wrote the following in his autobiography:

I say ‘not for the first time’ but I cannot believe that Alan was truly a danger, or even a minor menace, to the many boys he had worked with over the years. The only previous time in ten years that Andrew and I had come across such rumours concerning Alan, the allegations were proven to be exactly that, as the time and place of the supposed transgression clashed precisely with a recording date at which all three of us were continually present. It has been known for young boys, and more commonly their parents, to manufacture or exaggerate incidents when they know and (understandably) disapprove of a teacher’s inclinations. I am certainly not saying that this was the case with the circumstances that led to Alan’s awful end, or that Alan was squeaky clean throughout his musical dealings with his singers. However I suspect that there was a lot less to the cause of his tragedy than met the eye – just enough to render him incapable of facing the humiliation and shame that he knew he had brought upon himself. It was hard for me to believe that Alan, working with boys so closely for so many years, could have got away with any such behaviour for so long without being caught and hard to speak about him at his funeral, which I readily agreed to do. He played a crucial part in Andrew’s and my success, was an excellent choirmaster, and was never less than a highly amusing and generous companion. (Rice, Oh, What a Circus, p. 401)

Lloyd Webber and Rice themselves published a ‘Tribute’ in the Evening Standard a week after Doggett’s death (February 15th, 1978, p. 25), saying that ‘[w]e ourselves owe him a great deal’ (cited in Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, p. 277).

In the next issue of Magpie, the following text appeared:

Dear Sir,

‘Letters’ is a most acceptable way for members to express their opinions. Usually I don’t, but this time I am so shocked and distressed as a paedophile, and lover of music, that I will sound off.

On February 9th the Director of the ‘London Boys Singers’ was a troubled man. He attended the Magistrate’s Court, accused of ‘Indecency’ with a 10 year old boy.

I know none of the facts of his story, but can well imagine the innocence with which this act of love and affection had taken place.

No doubt Mr. Doggett, considering his social position, found his contact with the law enforcement people to be unacceptable to him. He was bailed, pending trial. He went to a pub and talked a while, wrote some letters to friends and relatives and then threw himself under a train.

If this man chose death as a means of protecting his beliefs towards Paedophilia, I wonder how many of those, who consider the bloody futile laws of this land to be correct and proper, would be willing to support their theories with their life?

It is of the utmost importance that Paedophiles be permitted to express themselves without oppression. It is the ONLY way to be sure that tragedies of this nature will be averted in the future.

My most sincere condolences to the members of the London Boy Singers.

Your loss is total.

Paul Andrews. (Letters, Magpie, Issue No. 10 (no date), p. 4)

Andrews was a treasurer of the Paedophile Information Exchange, at least in September 1978, when his house was raided, together with those of chairman Tom O’Carroll, secretary David Grove, and a Mr Ralph Alden (Gerard Kemp, ‘Child sex leaders raided’, Sunday Express, June 18th, 1978); Andrews had retired from this position by November 1979. He appeared in court with O’Carroll and Grove on July 26th, 1979 at Bow Street Magistrate’s Court on a charge of ‘Conspiracy to Corrupt Public Morals’ (at least as reported in Pan: A Magazine of Boy Love, Vol. 1, No. 3 (November 1979), p. 6). In 2007, a Paul Andrews, 41, was jailed indefinitely after pleading guilty at Preston Crown Court to four charges of causing or inciting a child to engage in sexual activity, one of attempted sexual activity with a child and one of causing a child to watch sexual activity. The boys involved were aged 11 and 13, and the offences had taken place in Andrews’ flat in Meetings View, Barrow. He had previously received convictions in 1997 for offences including indecent assault and received a three year probationary sentence, but then was jailed for four months after breaching his court order (J. Connor, ‘Pervert Locked Up Indefinitely’, North West Evening Mail, November 5th, 2007). However, it is not clear if this is definitely the same Paul Andrews (this latter would have been just 23 at the time of the Magpie piece).

It is not clear from the letter whether Andrews knew Doggett personally, but the tone of the letter suggests some familiarity with the case.

The February 23rd performance of Jason and the Golden Fleece at the Royal Albert Hall became a memorial concert for Doggett, also in aid of the organisation Help the Aged (‘The show that must go on’, News of the World, February 13th, 1978). Michael Stuckey, who had worked alongside Doggett for the 1972 productions of Joseph, took over the conducting (Walsh, Lloyd Webber, p. 67; Citron, Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, p. 151 n. 5; ‘Concert’s lost conductor’, The Guardian, February 24th, 1978; Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, p. 285). The concert was reviewed enthusiastically and with some poignance by none other than Derek Jewell, who had been so important in bringing Joseph to the attention of a wider audience ten years previously (Derek Jewell, ‘Joy fills the Albert Hall’, The Sunday Times, February 26th, 1978). The work would also receive a further performance in 1979 at the Connaught Theatre, Worthing, with an adult cast of around 25, and with Hugh Janes, who would later obtain the rights to the work, as narrator (Chandler, ‘Alan Doggett’, p. 285).

Another article appeared in Magpie in the following issue, this time from an anonymous contributor:

A letter in Magpie 10 reported and commented on the recent suicide of Alan Doggett three weeks before he was to conduct the London Boys Choir, together with massed choirs of other children at the Albert Hall. On the night of that concert the programme contained an insert describing Alan Doggett’s years of dedicated service and paying tribute to his friendliness, integrity and loyalty.

Shortly after this date a requiem mass was said for him at the Holy Cross Priory in Leicester by the Reverend Father Michael Ingram.

On Saturday 20th May a memorial service will be held to commemorate Alan’s life and work. It will start at 3 p.m. and will be held at St. Barnabas Church, Addison Road, London, W14, taking the form of a choral evensong, performed by the London Boys Choir.

These religious functions, one Roman, the other Anglican must be seen not only as ceremonies of intercession and remembrance, but also as containing an element of protest. It would seem to be true that in today’s society religious organisations provide almost the only vehicle whereby such a protest can be made. (‘Alan Doggett – Memorial Service’, Magpie, Issue No. 11, May 1978).

Father Michael Ingram, a Dominican priest, was himself a contributor to multiple issues of Magpie (see my other blogs for some examples of this), writing amongst other things about his supposed counselling of young boys over their sexual hang-ups and difficulties with their parents. He was found guilty in August 2000 of sexual offences, including one serious sexual offence, one offence of gross indecency, and four of indecent assault, against six boys committed between 1971 and 1978 (‘Former priest guilty of sex abuse’, The Tablet, August 19th, 2000, p. 26). A series of reports from the trial in the Leicester Mercury (from July 31st to August 15th, 2000, covering the course of the trial) detailed the awful events and traumatic experiences of Ingram’s victims as revealed in court, and how Ingram preyed upon those from under-privileged families and broken homes, some of them referred to him by social services. Ingram would also encourage boys to compete for his attentions and affection, especially on holiday trips. A letter to The Tablet in 2012 (Ingram had died in 2000) spoke of Ingram’s involvement with PIE, and also contribution to the book The Betrayal of Youth; Radical perspectives on childhood sexuality, intergenerational sex, and the social oppression of children and young people, edited Warren Middleton (London: CL Publications, 1986) (Middleton was a PIE Executive Committee member and former editor of Understanding Paedophilia – see my blog post here for samples from this publication), which featured many essays from individuals connected to PIE (and by feminist writer Beatrice Faust and gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell – see here for a list of contents and quotes). Nurse was surprised that despite the openness with which Ingram expressed his views on the desirability of sexual relationships between adults and children, he was still ‘remained in active ministry and was permitted to work with vulnerable and disadvantaged children’ (Richard Scorer, ‘Turning a blind eye’, The Tablet, November 10th, 2012, pp. 18-19).

Over three years after Doggett’s death, an article in New Society looking back at his plight also bears consideration, and suggests the author knew Doggett and more about the situation than he is revealing. This author was Colin Ward (1924-2010), a writer for anarchist publications, noted for an important book The Child in the City (London: The Architectural Place, 1977) (for more details on Ward, see Ken Worpole, ‘Colin Ward obituary’, The Guardian, February 22nd, 2010). Ward’s article is worth quoting from in detail, and is quite shocking by contemporary standards:

Chaps in pubs and clubs nod sagely at the mention of schoolmasters, scoutmaster and choirmasters. We all know what motivates them. It’s a bit embarrassing, to say the least, for all those people in these occupations whose devoted service is untinged by sexual attraction, but the stereotype exists and is quite often true.

Every now and then someone breaks ranks and points out (as the therapist Dr Richard Hauser did, to the accompaniment of a chorus of parliamentary questions) that if there were some machine for screening out those with a sexual attraction towards children, the caring professions would lose their most valuable people).

But publicly we brush aside ordinary wordly truths taken for granted by the chaps in pubs and clubs, or, worse, treat them as sudden terrible revelations. The recent moral crusade against paedophiles in the United States has led to all sorts of worthy people abandoning their voluntary activities in the boy scouts or in the Big Brother organisation (of adult males befriending boys from fatherless families) for fear of being identified with them.

It is interesting to see that the homosexual lobby there is sufficiently self-assured to fight back and to defend in the courts the right of its own paedophile minority to be scout leaders or Big Brothers, just as it is encouraging to read that the city authorities in Amsterdam have allowed a known paedophile – with a prison sentence behind him – to adopt a troublesome 13 year old boy from a children’s home. To harness people’s wayward and personal predilections to a socially desirable end is a mark, not of irresponsibility, but of civilisation. (Paeophilia, it is worth repeating, means the attraction of men towards boys. It’s pederasty when it turns into sexual activity.)

[……..]If Lewis Carroll had been born 100 years later, he, with his delight in taking nude photographs of his little girl friends, would find himself in the dock at the Old Bailey, charged under the Protection of Children Act, 1978.

Consider the cases of two choirmasters. Years ago, a celebrated college director of music (now dead) appeared before a private university court following charges that he had molested a choirboy. He was reprimanded and went back to his honoured place at High Table and to his work with the choir he had made world-famous. Contrast his experience with that of Alan Doggett. If you know Doggett’s name it is because you saw it on the record sleeve of Evita, where he is described as musical coordinator, though he did not live to see the stage production. He was found dead on a railway line three years ago.

On the very day that the coroner pronounced a verdict of suicide, he was to have conducted at the Albert Hall, a charity performance of his “pop extravaganza,” Jason and the Golden Fleece, with a thousand schoolboy singers and instrumentalists. He was a music teacher who had commissioned from Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, then in their teens, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat as a school opera. Later he was their musical director for Jesus Christ, Superstar. In 1964 [probably an erroneous date] he had become the director of the London Boy Singers, an ensemble founded at the instigation of Benjamin Britten in 1961. Everyone in the musical world paid tribute to his immense energy and his inspired teaching.

The day after his death, friends received through the post a note from him which said, “We all have to sail our own ship through life, and this ship has now capsized. No one could have helped. It was my destiny.” On the day of his death, he had been committed for trial on a charge of committing an act of indecency with a minor. According to the press, the police had intended to interview each of the thousand boys in the Albert Hall production.

I know young men who were members of that choir and who remember Alan Doggett with immense gratitude and respect. I have myself a family of young musicians, who, if any unexpected extra-musical experiences came their way, were sensible enough to handle them in their own way and keep quiet about them.

What is absolutely appalling is the degree of retribution exacted by the community for minor indiscretions which have been going on, as we all know, since the days of the ancient Greeks. In common, I imagine, with many readers of this journal (though only Tailgunner Parkinson, who is always ready to stick his neck out, spoke up for him), I reacted with horror and unbelief at the two-year sentence passed on Tom O’Carroll, after a re-trial.

He was found guilty, you will recall, under one of those obsolete statues which have to be dug up on these occasions, of “corrupting public morals” by publishing the information bulletin of the Paedophile Information Exchange. There was no evidence that he had committed any offence against any child. (The only charge of this nature against him was withdrawn last month and he was awarded costs).

[….More on O’Carroll and Paedophilia: the radical case…. – this awful publication can be found complete online here]

Another court case, involving incest, followed by the murder of a father by his daughter, which was reported on the same day as the result of the PIE trial, presents the other side of the argument. Statistically, the commonest known form of child-adult sexual activity is father-daughter incest. The enormous publicity given to cases of the sexual murder of children shouldn’t blind us to the fact that such instances are no more typical of the paedophiliac scene than rape-and-murder is characteristic of ordinary sex.

Of the millions of grams of sexual fluids ejaculated every night, most are expended in socially harmless ways, and, in spite of Roman Catholic teaching, not many of them are involved in the reproduction of our race: something for which we should all be thankful. But are we really so worried if some boy in the summer camp is masturbating with the youth club leader, instead of by himself? Don’t we all know that the investigation of the offence is ten times as traumatic as the actual experience itself?

[….More on O’Carroll….]

What really touched me about his [O’Carroll’s] book was the way he quoted his glowing testimonials as a teacher. I am sure that he is a marvellous teacher and that this is a by-product of his sexual inclinations. But this has not saved him, or hundreds of other men like him, from the horrors of a jail sentence on this kind of charge. The Department of Education has a blacklist, which we aren’t entitled to see, on which his name must be underlined.

Yet if we delve into personal memories, we find that innumerable experiences with people like him, far from involving any kind of violence or painful physical penetration, have simply been an aspect of growing up. I can remember the fumbling fondlings of a PE teacher as flattering, rather than terrifying. My wife remembers the attentions of a beloved teacher as yet another initiation into the joys of sex.

Here, as in so many other aspects of social life, there is a fantastic gap between what we all know to be true and our accepted public attitudes. Something we can learn from those old gents in pubs and clubs is the saving grace of worldliness.

This is common of the type of language, rhetoric and ideological assumptions which permeate pro-paedophile discourse. It portrays paedophilia as natural amongst those in the teaching or caring professions, makes any other view out as being akin to a witch-hunt, advocates ‘keeping quiet’ as the only ‘sensible’ response on the part of children, attempts to legitimise the practice by reference to historical figures (and the ancient Greeks), appropriates gay liberation towards its own ends, evokes the cultured (in this case musical) aspects of paedophiles, justifies masturbation of minors, claims that to investigate such offences is worse than the offences themselves, and betrays a type of Stockholm syndrome when speaking of one’s own experiences of sexual abuse. And it is most telling that the only two names who Ward discusses in detail are Doggett and O’Carroll.

Various accounts of Doggett’s character help to complete the picture. Jonathan Mantle shows the awkwardness of ‘the prematurely balding Doggett with his thick black spectacles and his vulnerability to mockery’ which contrasted strongly with the ‘mop-haired, feminine looking youth whose facial hair seemed to be concentrated in a pair of thick, black eyebrows which rose and fell incessantly’ of Lloyd Webber (Mantle, Fanfare, p. 42). Mantle also writes:

Doggett was a split personality: outwardly a charming, witty man, a competent keyboard player and arranger and a highly successful architect of the Colet Court choir, but inwardly a nervy, intense homosexual of unhappy inclinations which would eventually destroy him. He had taken a shine to Andrew at an early age and became his self-appointed musical minder, making sure the young composer’s phenomenal aptitude for tunes was translated into music whose time signature always worked and bars added up correctly. (Mantle, Fanfare, pp. 30-31)

He further suggests that Ian Hunter, whilst appreciating deeply what Doggett was able to do for the Colet Court choir, had ‘few illusions about the more volatile aspects of his personality’ (Mantle, Fanfare, pp. 42-43); McKnight quotes Hunter as saying that Doggett ‘was not very brilliant musically’, but had a great ‘ability to communicate with kids’ (McKnight, Lloyd Webber, p. 86).

Gerald McKnight refers to Doggett as ‘a sad, pathetically mixed-up man in private life’, though ‘his passion for music endeared him to Dr and Mrs Lloyd Webber’, who the composers regularly ragged, using instructions such as ‘With un-Doggett-like expression!’ and ‘Doggett Mobbed!’ (McKnight, Lloyd Webber, pp. 85, 99).

Mantle points out however how central a part of Lloyd Webber’s social circle was Doggett (together with David Crewe-Read, Gray Watson, Bridget (Biddy) Hayward and Jamie Muir), whilst implying that Doggett’s place in this circle depended upon ‘past glories’; in his later work with Lloyd Webber, according to Mantle, he came to ‘ look more and more like a man who had been left behind’ (Mantle, Fanfare, pp. 117-118, 131).

The second Magpie article, with its reference to the two religious services ‘containing an element of protest’ and how ‘religious organisations provide almost the only vehicle whereby such a protest can be made’, is ominous, and suggests a deeper knowledge of Doggett and his activities. The inquest found that Doggett had only written two letters, which he had posted from Paddington Station on the evening he died – one to his sitter and the other to a clergyman (‘Concert’s lost conductor’, The Guardian, February 24th, 1978; this article dates the inquest as taking place three weeks previously, but this is impossible because of the date of Doggett’s death) (there was no mention of the letter to Rice). Who was the clergyman in question?

Otherwise, the article by Colin Ward, the fact of their having been two different pieces on Doggett in Magpie, and the fact that in all of these cases the language is quite typical of paedophile parlance (especially in PIE publications), combined with the various accounts of Doggett’s abuse of children in both 1968 and 1978, certainly indicate that more information is needed to establish the truth. Doggett was indeed a fully paid-up member of PIE; as many such members have been implicated in international child abuse and pornography networks, as well as rings of abusers, the implications are extremely disturbing for one who worked with such a range of children (I would estimate around 1500-2000 just for the period 1968-78, after Doggett left Colet Court).

Doggett’s story is tragic, and he undoubtedly needed help and support such as might have avoided involvement with the dark world of PIE instead. But the potential tragedy for many who worked with him, and how this all might supply further important information about the workings of PIE and its involvement with abuse networks, remains the important question today. At the time of David Chandler’s article in 2012, Ian Hunter was certainly still alive; others interviewed included Roger Ford (husband of the late Rita), and Julian Lloyd Webber. There were literally thousands of boys who studied with Doggett (who would be in their 50s and 60s at the time of writing), so many who could shed further light onto what exactly went on, not to mention the many other musicians who worked with him, and others mentioned in this article. I appeal to those who knew Doggett to help to establish further the truth about and extent of his activities once and for all.

Anyone wishing to speak under conditions of complete confidentiality is welcome to e-mail me at ian@ianpace.com , and I can give advice regarding what to do with any information.